Hacker News Reader

Comment by beefield | Hacker News Reader

> The metric system is such a beauty, that it's shocking that is not used everywhere.

You can check with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I think he nails it. The imperial system is much more natural for people to grasp. A pound is roughly a fist sized rock, but there are no natural objects that weight around one kilogram. And one yard is roughly the length of a step, completely unlike a meter. And so forth. /s

Seriously, I propose a compromise. Europeans give up decimal comma and US gives up imperial measurements. Everyone wins.

View on HN

> Europeans give up decimal comma and US gives up imperial measurements.

I’m a European, and I hate decimal comma. When consuming data saved by MS Excel or similar, dealing with decimal commas is an ongoing source of annoyance and compatibility bugs, for all my 22 years in the software industry.

Modern software has American roots. Many programming languages like C, C++ and Python are using dot when printing or parsing floats with their standard libraries. It’s even in the name, these numbers are called “floating point” not “floating comma”.

Also in Excel you can set (as per your language used) the comma as decimal separator, but internally it remains dot, an example is the VBA Evaluate function.

> there are no natural objects that weight around one kilogram

Yes there is: a liter of water (see the beauty?)

> Europeans give up decimal comma and US gives up imperial measurements. Everyone wins.

And US gives up strange day-in-the-middle date format as a bonus to make everyone there sane.

> Yes there is: a liter of water (see the beauty?)

There was /s at the end of the sentence, meaning I was sarcastic:)

>And US gives up strange day-in-the-middle date format as a bonus to make everyone there sane.

We should all switch to the ISO (and some (most?) Asian country) format of Year-Month-Day.

From a Canadian comedy group, in the 80s, when we were transitioning to metric....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjFaKD9BuOc

I can hardly wait for first contact, and the planet has to transition to some galactic standard...

"Why would you humans use water in your unit system? Less than 0.01% of the universe is water! 1 elom of dark mater has a mass of 1 marg, your system is obviously not as logical as this!"

I am pretty sure in modern days most people have easier access to 1L of water or 1kg of flour than a fist sized rock.

Everything that matters to people is as easily mapped out to metric units. I know how to span my fingers to get either 10 cm, 20 cm or 25 cm, and how to pace my steps to get 1 m. Arm span is easy too, I simply get my height and can work based on that, as I do when measuring heights. Step pacing is quite visible and I see it regularly in the open in various contexts. Metric people know how to do these kinds of things. Real estate agents or construction workers might refine their paces to achieve greater precision, but even people who have never had the curiosity or need to do so can get a rough estimate of a meter that's probably good enough and not much more imprecise than the length of the step of another person (like feet… Charlemagne's giant foot became the standard unit for peasants with half the foot size for centuries…). I've never felt any personal interest in measuring weights based on fist-sized rocks either (sandstone or granite by the way? you've got all sorts of density ranges out there…), but I'm sure you could find something as intuitive if you needed it and I sure can get of sense of weights expressed in grams in a kitchen and have also developed a pretty good intuitive feel of heavier stuff based on a few experiences moving 25 kg and 50 kg bags around that proves useful from time to time.

> Seriously, I propose a compromise. Europeans give up decimal comma and US gives up imperial measurements. Everyone wins.

As a Brit, I completely support the US giving up imperial measures for Europeans giving up decimal commas.

The US doesn't use Imperial units, it wasn't part of the British Empire at the time that system was standardised.

It uses US Statute Units which are similar but not always the same as Imperial Units.

There are some very important differences...

Hence the reason that no Brit is ever impressed with a "pint" served in a US bar. It looks like the barman forgot to pour all of it. :P

We should retire Imperial, US and Nautical units and switch everything to SI Metric.

Having several definitions of mile, pint, gallon, foot, etc in use, at the same time, is just feckin' silly.

> more natural for people to grasp

You added sarcasm flag but sometimes it is more natural. I grew up with metric but can visualize "about an inch" better than "about 2.5cm".

It's common for "metric people" to sometimes use inches and feet in casual reference to certain types of measurements. "She is almost 6 feet tall" is another example that will be used instead of "180 cm" or "1.8 metres".

No one where I live and use metric system even have clue what is the feet and inches mess... Like five foot what? Why not do it properly and say five point something feet like sane systems.

At least here in Western (continental) Europe, it really isn't. I have never heard somebody say something like "She is almost 6 feet tall".

Okay so how would they describe someone's height?

For example, telling a story about their daughter who has grown quickly and is now "almost [n units] tall"? Are you saying they would use centimeters and expect their listener to know what "184 cm" looks like?

I'm not saying metric people use "5 foot 9", but it's common in my country (Australia) at least to use "6 foot" because that's a nice easy rounded benchmark. In metric height, there is no benchmark until 2 metres tall, which is a rare height even for men.

People would either use 10s of centimetres, so saying "my daughter is almost 170cm tall" or use a measure relative to somebody else, often including "heads" or "half-heads" ("my daughter is already half a head taller than me"). You might want to argue that a "head" is pretty similar to a foot though.

Ignoring the /s ... a yard is still a fair bit longer than the average stride length - it's probably about right if you're close to 2m tall though. OTOH an average male adult's hip is around 1m from the ground. Pineapples and cabbages typically weigh close to 1kg. Fist-sized rocks can vary enormously in weight - anywhere from a few 100g (pumice etc) to over 1kg (pyrite, assuming a large hand size).

> A pound is roughly a fist sized rock

I've seen quite some fists and they all varied in size. This seems like a really bad idea to use as a reference.

And I've seen many rocks with different densities. Also making it a really bad idea to use as a reference.

Of course pre-metric units were defined by something convenient. A cubit is the length of the forearm.

I don't think Taleb goes into the why.

Metric is clearly superior if you have the social concept that units should be standardized and (as a corralary) that products are commoditized. The idea of a standard commodity, however, didn't really exist before the industrial revolution.

So why would units be standardized before that? The only place units mattered was taxes, and then the unit was whatever the king said it was.

> A cubit is the length of the forearm.

> I don't think Taleb goes into the why.

You can measure rope and cloth using cubits by wrapping them around the fist (which holds one end) and the elbow.

A meter is one big step. Easy to count out 10 meters

>Europeans give up decimal comma

consider it done

Luckily we have 1l milk boxes. I always compare weight to what 1l of milk would weight.

I looked up the density just in case. 1.035 kg/L. Close enough.

> Europeans give up decimal comma

Never!

c'mon it screws up the csv. I'd personally not use comma for decimals, even though I was taught at school

Simple: dot separated values. ;)

Why not use the ASCII group separator? (0x1D)

Also imperial units can be divided into quarters and thirds using whole numbers.

Where this property is useful, you can often choose a different starting 'unit'.

For example, fitted kitchen cupboards are designed in multiples of 150mm, which has plenty of nice factors. A dishwasher might be 600mm wide, or a typical cupboard 450mm.

and 5/32s if you need a better precision?

Unpopular opinion: english units make sense to normal humans. metric units make it easier to do physics. (i'm a physicist)

That’s just familiriaty bias

Counter opinion: no one who grew up in a country with the metric system would know how to understand "I weigh 14 stones". What stones? Small ones? Big ones? Who decides if it's a big one or a small one? Also, how would I know how much a stone weighs?

It's just silly. It has no more bearing on reality than a kg does.

English units like my 2 litre kettle which I use to fill my 300ml cup with tea? Yes they do make sense.

If you grow up in a country that uses metric basically exclusively, it’s not. I literally cannot visualise 10 feet but if you say three metres I instantly have a feel for how long that is (I even Googled the conversion because I couldn’t be bothered working it out). I wouldn’t have any idea what 100 degrees Fahrenheit felt like if I didn’t know it’s about 38 degrees C. And so on…

This is not an unpopular opinion. Millions of anglophones seem to be unable to grasp or accept that metric measures make intuitive sense to people who use them.

I'll grant that words like inches, pounds and miles have more literary gravitas to them than centimetres, kilograms or kilometers, and it would be a shame to lose those former words completely, but arguing they make more "sense" is really pushing it. I literally have no "sense" of what a "stone" weighs, how deep a "fathom" or a "league" is, how much area a "rood" covers, or how much liquid makes up a fluid ounce, and I doubt I ever will. And they're just some of the more common units!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com