Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the occasional crashed Mars lander, technical people in the U.S. get along quite fine thinking in the units best suited to the task at hand. I develop film in my apartment, and I use metric units while developing black and white but conventional units while developing color slide film — because the processes are documented in those respective units.

I don't know what kind of car Cranky Bill is driving, but if it's new enough, chances are he could crack the manual and figure out how to switch it to display values in liters/100km. My motorcycle does that, and my last car did it. I set my motorcycle to display temperatures Celsius, speeds in whatever the local country's unit happens to be, and fuel efficiency in mph.

Also, he might just look up the stats for his car on the Internet.

Bill sure is cranky.

View on HN

I asked the people at Nissan and I was told it wasn't possible to switch it to miles-per-litre. Although I do suspect the person I spoke to had no idea what I was going on about.

But could you change it to km-per-litre?

Litre-per-100km is the European standard.

Dimensionally, that has units of area, and so could be expressed in hectares. My car is getting about 11.5 pico hectares.

The same way that torque has the dimensionality of energy and can be measured in joules.

>...technical people in the U.S. get along quite fine thinking in the units best suited to the task at hand.

More like technical people in the U.S. get along quite fine thinking in the units traditionally used for the task at hand. I'd much rather actually use the units best suited for the task, which tend not to be imperial.

What are these tasks that were traditionally performed in customary units in the U.S. — and continue to be done in them — but are more suited to SI units?

An important obstacle to my psychological well-being as an engineer is the failure of humanity to adopt UTC for use on their wall clocks, a failure that has little to do with America's metrical intransigence.

> technical people in the U.S. get along quite fine thinking in the units best suited to the task at hand.

Is this to say that Imperial units have some intrinsic advantage over Metric in some places? Because to me, it seems like it’s just easier to use one set of units.

Ever try dividing a meter or liter into thirds?

Yes, I seem to recall getting 333 1/3 milliliters, which is usually rounded as 330ml in most contexts.

I don’t see how this is any more of an issue than trying to calculate, for example, one-third of a mile (586 2/3 yards) or one-third of a gallon (1 1/3 quarts, 2 2/3 pints or 42 2/3 fl oz.)

The pervasiveness of computers, phones, and the internet has all but eliminated the majority of the benefit of switching to metric in America anyway.

In 1978, I'm sure it saved countless hours of calculation and conversion. But in 2019 calculation and unit conversion is a task for computers and not people, and for computers it makes no difference.

I think it'd actually save more resources to focus on other forms of standardization. Maybe the UK could drive on the right side of the road, for example. Or maybe they could ditch their arcane electrical plugs for the European or American standards. These changes would save a tremendous amount of localization waste.

I'd like to offer a friendly early warning of the ... debate you're about to encounter with your description of our vastly superior electrical outlets and plugs as "arcane".

Arcane isn't a judgment on value. You could use the word "rare" instead if you like.

It totally is and if you'd ever stood on one you'll know how magnificently sturdy they are.

I could totally live with Schuko instead of BS1363. A lot of earlier standards in Europe were crap, but Schuko does more or less everything BS1363 does, and at 3.5kW instead of 3kW.

I could probably be argued around to the French alternative to Schuko, I think Schuko is better, but the French way (and the plugs that accept either but not other crap systems) isn't terrible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com