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Comment by okket | Hacker News Reader

When you set human extremities as references instead of fundamental physical properties, yes.

You're misinformed. A foot as a measurement in 2018 has no more to do with a human foot than a computer chip has to do with a potato-powered calculator. Imperial units have had standard metric translations for a long time.

Of course, you can use or invent whatever measure system you like, if you provide a translation. But why translate? Why not use what the rest of the world uses?

When you come from the outside, it feels like a trip to middle ages reading about 'furlongs', 'hogsheads' and 'pennyweights'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

"There's this widespread legacy system. Why won't those stupid people just migrate to the newish and better one?" (Key words: legacy, migrate. I still see dozens of WinXP systems around, alive and kicking.)

That's exactly it. Metric is on every single food item. Food is like a modern 64 bit system. Meanwhile, the roads are still in miles per hour and all temperatures are in Fahrenheit, so I need an 8 bit subsystem to run it.

I would have to convert back to feet and miles if the article didn't have it because I'm not used to those units since I never have an opportunity to use them in my daily life. Metric is not as intuitive as its promoters insist. Intuition is developed through use.

Civilization-scale issues require civilization-scale solutions. I can't unilaterally convert to metric in every context because it would be terribly impractical. I would spend my days doing conversions. That's a huge waste of finite time and energy.

> Food is like a modern 64 bit system. Meanwhile, the roads are still in miles per hour and all temperatures are in Fahrenheit, so I need an 8 bit subsystem to run it.

The problem with that analogy is that a 64-bit computer is inherently, in isolation, much more powerful than an 8-bit. For the vast majority of cases, the same is not true for a switch from from, say, ounces to ml to measure the size of a bottle of water.

That's a bit of a mixed bag. Once you do realize that 1 cm3 (1 ml) of water is also 1 g (as it's 1000g/1l = 1g/1ml), and that a 10x10x10 cm cube is 1 l (and is 1 kg), it does get powerful in unexpected ways ("cook half liter of water...hm, how do I measure...well that's 500 ml, so I'll just weigh 500 g, exactly the same thing"); and a 10 l bucket of water weighs 10 kg; similarly with other decimal units. This, I think, is intrinsically useful - how does this translate into US units, are there such simple conversions? (IDK, so this is not a rhetorical question)

> how does this translate into US units, are there such simple conversions?

Not really. I have a couple of these types of conversions committed to memory (1 gal water = 7 pounds, etc.), but it's all pretty ad hoc. That said, I haven't found too much use for it.

All that said, I very much appreciate the orthogonality and consistency of SI. In an ideal world, the US would be on it, or at least on something the same as the rest of the world. Aside from sheer habit, I think the most compelling argument for the reason we aren't is that the units we use are so heavily baked into physical objects.

> it feels like a trip to middle ages reading about 'furlongs', 'hogsheads' and 'pennyweights'.

I've lived in the United States for my entire life (43 years) and have never come close to ever seeing these units in use. To be honest, while I've heard of them, I couldn't even give a reasonable definition. I'm pretty sure the primary modern use for these units is either as a historical curiosity or as a way to pass judgement.

The US put a god damned man on the moon, they're far from dark ages.

And lost a mars orbiter thanks to the US customary units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

Think what could have happened if the Apollo Program was an international effort and not a U.S. only one.

Probably wouldn’t have left low Earth orbit [0].

For better or worse more effective organizations generally present themselves as a unit with aligned interests. Organizations with misaligned internal interests get as far as the lowest common denominator among their interests weighted by the relative power of members. That’s a far more significant factor than choice of measurement standards.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

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