Hacker News Reader

Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

> Well, to be fair, those anti-metric folks had at least one point in their favor: Customary measures make a lot more sense to us.

The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you. This misconception comes up time and time again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501

The article seems like fluff; the author isn't even making novel mistakes.

He even says that the metric system "died". Hah. That's true only in a very limited parochial sense; it's the most popular system of measurement on planet earth even if it's isn't used for day-to-day things in the USA.

View on HN

> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you

This is true to at least my case: grew up under the metric system and after 15 years living in the US, still have to mentally convert dimensions to metric in order to make sense of them:

- If you point at something and ask me how far it is, the first number that comes to my mind is in meters, then I say that number and add "yards" or mentally multiply it by 3 and add "feets"

- If you ask me to grab something and give you the weight, the number comes in Kg and I mentally multiply it by 2.2 to give and approximate weight in pounds.

Just FYI, "feets" isn't a word. The plural of feet is feet :)

Similarly, "softwares" isn't a word either, but I hear it a lot. There's only software.

I say this because it's a common mistake among people who speak well, otherwise.

And "codes" !!

Actually, the use of "code" as a count noun is quite old and well entrenched in the numerical modelling community. I can recall back in the early 1970s hearing Fortran programs routinely referred to as "codes".

Code is a weird one because there are times when it's correct (e.g. "encryption codes"). But when it's used to mean "software" it should never be "codes", IMHO, though I guess there's a minority in disagreement.

I understand why you would think so, as I haven't heard the usage anywhere else in the software world that I've been, but it is a standard usage in that community; it's not hard to find examples [0] [1] [2] [3].

[0] http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f_src/f_src.html

[1] http://www.unige.ch/~hairer/software.html

[2] http://www.mcs.anl.gov/project/openadf-automatic-differentia...

[3] http://math.berkeley.edu/~strain/Codes/

I most often hear it from programmers who are not native speakers of English, so it always sounds wrong to me.

Yep "codes" just makes you sound amateur and third rate.

same for "data"

Seeing as I started as a Fortran programmer in the 70's I have never heard this usage.

Oh and this was on campus at CIT for a world leading RnD organisation in their math modelling section.

Interestingly, and to my big surprise, "fishes" is quite correct!

"fishes" refers to multiple species of fish, while "fish" is the correct plural form of a school of a single species.

That distinction is likely to die out, given that lots of other English words that used to predominantly or only use the same form in singular and plural are steadily moving towards separate plural form.

Awesome!Though, which one should you use if both are correct?

"... plenty of fish(es) in the sea." for instance?

Actually feet is the plural of foot :)

you know, i rewrote that post several times, rephrasing and correcting it yet I failed to spot "feets".

> Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you

Yeah. I live in Italy, but grew up in the US. I'm happy with the metric system and wished we had it in the US too, but for certain kinds of measurements, it still doesn't feel quite as natural to me. It depends entirely on how much I use something - temperatures in metric are second nature, because you feel that on your skin every day. Things like people's heights or weights, not so much. How many atmospheres to pump up my road bike tires? I have no idea, I use the pounds per square inch scale on the pump!

I don't try and justify any of this, it's just what I grew up with.

Oddly enough the SI unit is Pascal (Pa) or N/m2, not atmosphere. The technical atmosphere is: around 98KPa, it's not really metric.

kPa. Otherwise it'd be Kelvinpascals. And while pressure is often said to be x atmospheres, they usually use bar, which is an SI-derived unit (equal to 10⁵ Pa), which is close enough to the old usage of atmospheres.

There seem to have been two different atmospheres that were pretty close anyway. One being defined as air pressure at sea level, the other being defined as the pressure of 10 meters of water.

>>kPa. Otherwise it'd be Kelvinpascals.

Great observation! I guess I am way too used to KB and in that very case KPa would be 1024Pa which is even worse. Have an upvote.

That'd be KiPa, then (kibipascals) ;)

Standardised since 1999, I think. But no one really uses it. Kilobytes would technically be kB as well.

The most used unit for pressure used in Germany is bar (= 100 kPa) so that you don't have to deal with really big numbers all the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_(unit)

> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you.

This seems to be a reinforcement of the point you quoted, and not a refutation of it.

That would depend on who he's calling "us". It doesn't include me! I read "us" as "people, all people in general" and disagreed.

The statement "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us people who prefer Customary measures" is true but only as an uninteresting tautology. Do you think he meant "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us Americans" ? That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scientifically literate".

The statement read as "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us people who were raised on them" is true. But by not being explicit about that he is misleading.

> That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scientifically literate".

Well, I think it would include Canadians in most circumstances - metric adoption in Canada is only marginally more pervasive than in the US - and would also include most "scientifically literate" Americans outside the context of formal scientific research (it would seem a bit absurd to suggest that because a microbiologist measures his research subjects in nanometers, he'll somehow find it optimal to use the same unit to measure his furniture).

But, yes, as a tautology, it isn't much of an argument for or against anything, apart from being a very strong argument against artificial imposition of unnecessary changes.

Sure. Though I wouldn't categorise the USA (and to some extent Canada and UK) finally getting on board the same metric bus as the rest of the planet as entirely "unnecessary".

I don't understand why it's necessary to implement methods in your own situation just because someone else is using them in theirs. That seems to be a cargo-cult mentality. If there's no endogenous case for using the metric system, why do so?

By the same reasoning, you could argue that people should all adopt e.g. Esperanto in place of their own languages for use in all circumstances without distinction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com