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Developers hear me out! Playing in English doesn't mean refusing the Metric system!

By "beloved Military" I meant it as in even the most American thing that's ever American'd in the history of America thats loved by everyone in the country use the "god-less, communist Metric system". Not precisely what a white male GOP voter living in rural Mississippi that has a Support our Troops bumper sticker on his truck use or even likes in his daily life.

I'm guessing NASA is less liked, thats why i omitted calling them "beloved".

So your tone wasn't joking. Got it. I didn't realize I was in the presence of an expert on American history and society.

Don't let those generalizations get in the way of whatever point it is you think you're making.
 

FanDeNintendo

Neo Member
I live in the States and I've been arguing this for years. I'm sick of the imperial system. If you're doing anything with science then you're already using the metric system. The metric system is easier for calculations and conversions. It's just a better system and there's no reason for Americans to prioritize the imperial system any longer. I hate it.

Talkng about calculations... I just remembered a pic:

8264a88f4ca41e99cce9f40b2d20179f--metric-system-infographics.jpg
 

failgubbe

Member
There are 24 hours of day for the whole world regardless of where you are. The only things timezones offer are a "normalized" clock - When you wake up it's 7:00 am or whatever time you wake up. That would be true regardless of where you are in the world. The sun is where you would expect it to be for 7:00am.

Now, without timezones, the sun is still in the exact same spot as you would expect it to be, but the clock just has a different time, a "world time." So instead of New York being 3 hours ahead of Los Angeles, they are on the same clock. So let's say the day starts in New York (We set that as the first time zone) and you wake up at 7:00am. Its still 7:00am in Log Angeles, but the sun won't be up for another 3 hours. So, you wake up at 10:00am in Los Angeles, but to both of you, the sun is where you would expect it to be when you wake up. It's just that now the hours on the clock seem different, but functionality, nothing changes about society. It's 10 in New York and 10 in LA, but LA is just waking up.

I know they say Americans are dumb but damn dude
 
I know they say Americans are dumb but damn dude

Ha, it seems complicated (I may well have messed up the time conversions somewhere here), but it really isn't. It's just hard to wrap your head around the idea that 10:00am might be your new wake up time (But that it wouldn't actually be any different from your current wake up time.)

But I think that's probably why it won't happen for a very long time; because it seems complicated and few of us actually have to deal with timezones as it is, so there's not a lot of easy to see benefit to making the switch. The core benefit is that there is no more time conversion, and that's pretty much it.
 
Remember when this thread was about video games?

Now we're debating timezones for no good reason. These video game Imperial vs Metric threads always devolve into this crap. It's barely even worth talking about for the actual games, because it really doesn't matter.
 
Ha, it seems complicated (I may well have messed up the time conversions somewhere here), but it really isn't. It's just hard to wrap your head around the idea that 10:00am might be your new wake up time (But that it wouldn't actually be any different from your current wake up time.)

But I think that's probably why it won't happen for a very long time; because it seems complicated and few of us actually have to deal with timezones as it is, so there's not a lot of easy to see benefit to making the switch. The core benefit is that there is no more time conversion, and that's pretty much it.

but you would still have to calculate if it's late or not in some part of the world... as i see it, it solves absolutely nothing! It's even worse? Hey it's 7 pm, i must call someone in japan, it's also 7 pm there.... how would i know if it's too late or too early or not for them? huuuuuh....
 
but you would still have to calculate if it's late or not in some part of the world... as i see it, it solves absolutely nothing! It's even worse? Hey it's 7 pm, i must call someone in japan, it's also 7 pm there.... how would i know if it's too late or too early or not for them? huuuuuh....

Yeah, we would have to have a world-wide awareness of what times were night and day, or at least an awareness of the areas you worked with. What 0700 means to me as far as the work day would mean something totally different to someone else in another part of the world.

But if I say a meeting is taking place at 1100, you would know to log into that meeting at 1100. There would be no confusion about whether you mean 1100 your time, or someone else's time. Like I said, it's a hard argument to make when the benefits are not huge and it introduces other things we would find confusing (At least for a while).

This is ultimately not really what the OP was about though, so I'll drop this particular convo!

Yeah, that was annoying in Zelda.

What about it did you find annoying? I don't think I could even tell you what counters we're used in that game. The temp was just a gauge, right? I'm assuming then that the distance was in Imperial, but given that you have a map that you can easily check to see distance, and that a straight line guestimate of distance isn't even that useful given the games terrain, what about it presented problems?
 

Phu

Banned
There are 24 hours of day for the whole world regardless of where you are. The only things timezones offer are a "normalized" clock - When you wake up it's 7:00 am or whatever time you wake up. That would be true regardless of where you are in the world. The sun is where you would expect it to be for 7:00am.

Now, without timezones, the sun is still in the exact same spot as you would expect it to be, but the clock just has a different time, a "world time." So instead of New York being 3 hours ahead of Los Angeles, they are on the same clock. So let's say the day starts in New York (We set that as the first time zone) and you wake up at 7:00am. Its still 7:00am in Log Angeles, but the sun won't be up for another 3 hours. So, you wake up at 10:00am in Los Angeles, but to both of you, the sun is where you would expect it to be when you wake up. It's just that now the hours of the clock seem different, but functionality, nothing changes about society.

That just seems to shift one inconvenience to another inconvenience. Instead of keeping track of the differences in time zones, you'd have to keep track of the various contexts people have during a specific time. Right now, 6:00 means the same thing everywhere in the world, but without time zones my 6:00 would be someone else's 15:00.

Personally, I think it's easier to account for a difference in a number than it is to account for a difference in the phase of a day. I think it's more useful to just know California and New York are 3 hours apart than it is to know California's true midnight is at 3am.

How would we mark a change in day? Right now we base it off the general day/night cycle and accept that 'midnight' will happen at different times for everyone. But if we keep that system with the removal of time zones then a day change would happen at any hour of the day depending on where you are. You'd just have to know the UK changes days at 8pm. And if you were to base it off the 24 hour clock and make the day change the same for everyone, you'd have the clock ticking over from 24:00 to 00:01 during different phases of the day depending on where you are. You'd end up with people living lives where they eat lunch at 20:00 on the 23rd and then eat dinner 6 hours later at 2:00 on the 24th. Both options seem worse than what we have going on now.
 

-shadow-

Member
Can someone explain the idea between all the different measurements of the imperial system? Because that stuff don't make any sense. Why does the US (and some other countries) keep using it anyway. Well other than what they're used to it.
 

lyrick

Member
That just seems to shift one inconvenience to another inconvenience. Instead of keeping track of the differences in time zones, you'd have to keep track of the various contexts people have during a specific time. Right now, 6:00 means the same thing everywhere in the world, but without time zones my 6:00 would be someone else's 15:00.

Personally, I think it's easier to account for a difference in a number than it is to account for a difference in the phase of a day. I think it's more useful to just know California and New York are 3 hours apart than it is to know California's true midnight is at 3am.

How would we mark a change in day? Right now we base it off the general day/night cycle and accept that 'midnight' will happen at different times for everyone. But if we keep that system with the removal of time zones then a day change would happen at any hour of the day depending on where you are. You'd just have to know the UK changes days at 8pm. And if you were to base it off the 24 hour clock and make the day change the same for everyone, you'd have the clock ticking over from 24:00 to 00:01 during different phases of the day depending on where you are. You'd end up with people living lives where they eat lunch at 20:00 on the 23rd and then eat dinner 6 hours later at 2:00 on the 24th. Both options seem worse than what we have going on now.

For those of us that played PSO we became masters of converting .beats to human time.

It didn't catch on. Apparently conversion is hard for some.
 
How would we mark a change in day?

Yup. Not an easy argument to make. The concept of the "date" would have to become something more conceptual too. I'm certain there are smart people with solutions for these kinds of issues, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to get any deeper than the basic concept.

Can someone explain the idea between all the different measurements of the imperial system? Because that stuff don't make any sense. Why does the US (and some other countries) keep using it anyway. Well other than what they're used to it.

I don't think there's a much more nuanced answer than "used to it." There are some arguments about precision, but for what most people use temp, weight, distance for, there's really no need to extra precision.

But "used to it" is a big argument. Food, drink, gasoline, and any number of other things you encounter on a daily basis present imperial measurements first and foremost in the US. Asking all those industries to convert over for no real profit to those industries or consumers isn't a compelling argument. The majority of sciences already use metric, as does much of the medical field, so in places where we see international interaction, it's not really a debate. What is the benefit to everyone else to switch over?

Apparently, we get to avoid threads like this! But other than that, how often do we even encounter challenges between the systems? I'm guessing for most people, very, very rarely.
 
By "beloved Military" I meant it as in even the most American thing that's ever American'd in the history of America thats loved by everyone in the country use the "god-less, communist Metric system". Not precisely what a white male GOP voter living in rural Mississippi that has a Support our Troops bumper sticker on his truck use or even likes in his daily life.

I'm guessing NASA is less liked, thats why i omitted calling them "beloved".
Uhh no, the US aerospace and defense industries both use imperial units. If you're going to blow hot air at least get your facts straight lol
 

royox

Member
Since we all do real Science in °K anyway metric temperatures are pretty much nonsense, offering no perks above the other two measures unless you absolutely live for Water freezing.


As a chemist I have to disagree. We calculate energies and some other stuff with K but for ANYTHING ELSE we use ºC. You will never hear chemists discussing stuff in Kelvin. We always work in ºC and convert it into Kelvin in the last second when we have to work with equations because every fucking variable is on Kelvin.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
The metric system is better for calculations and scaling, but honestly the length of a foot is a more common length for objects for me than a meter. A laptop, a DVR box, a pot/pan, a wine bottle, they're all roughly a foot in length. Many things in life are in increments of this size. A meter is just too big of a common increment at almost 3 feet, and a centimeter is too small for most common objects. Nobody thinks in terms of decimeters (but maybe they should).

Anyway, yeah, this should be an option since it is so easy to implement.

I think in terms of decimeters all the time. Is that uncommon in other metric countries or something? Here in Sweden it's perfectly normal. Also millimeters, centimeters, meters, kilometers and Scandinavian miles (10 km - was surprised to learn this isn't used outside Scandinavia), depending on the scale. All very easily convertible in base 10. Just move that decimal point.
 

lyrick

Member
Hahahahaha so true. The imperial system has an origin and it probably worked for them at the time. It's just outdated today. Work smarter, not harder and all that jazz.

It reads that way because of an ignorance actually displayed on the graph. PROTIP: Fahrenheit has nothing to do with water freezing, that's Celsius. Which is why Celsius doesn't align worth a shit to average Low and High daily temperatures the world over.
 

lyrick

Member
As a chemist I have to disagree. We calculate energies and some other stuff with K but for ANYTHING ELSE we use ºC. You will never hear chemists discussing stuff in Kelvin. We always work in ºC and convert it into Kelvin in the last second when we have to work with equations because every fucking variable is on Kelvin.

hmmm... I wonder why?
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
It reads that way because of an ignorance actually displayed on the graph. PROTIP: Fahrenheit has nothing to do with water freezing, that's Celsius. Which is why Celsius doesn't align worth a shit to average Low and High daily temperatures the world over.

That specific aspect, yes. But everything else in that image is completely true and utterly hilarious.

And at least up here in the north, knowing that water freezes at 0 C is very useful during winter. Below 0, shit is gonna be frozen and slippery. Above 0, not freezing.

And how useful is 100 F for "average Low and High daily temperatures the world over", really? That's 38 C, which I can inform you is hot as FUCK. Here we rarely even get 30 C. Sure, in other countries 40 C might not be so rare, but your argument of it being useful the world over falls flat.
 

Fisty

Member
I had a fun time figuring out when I would start freezing and when I would start cooking in No Man's Sky. Now I know the Celcius scale!

Thanks video games!
 

lyrick

Member
That specific aspect, yes. But everything else in that image is completely true and utterly hilarious.

And at least up here in the north, knowing that water freezes at 0 C is very useful during winter. Below 0, shit is gonna be frozen and slippery. Above 0, not freezing.

And how useful is 100 F for "average Low and High daily temperatures the world over", really? That's 38 C, which I can inform you is hot as FUCK. Here we rarely even get 30 C. Sure, in other countries 40 C might not be so rare, but your argument of it being useful the world over falls flat.

Hmm... maybe someone should make a infographic that shows the 0 F - 100 F captioned as "Scientist created scale to emphasis granularity based on observed temperatures in local climate" then another that shows -17 C to 38 C captioned as "some shit that has to do with purified/distilled water?"
 
Even if we did convert, I'm not sure the billions we'd spend in updating infrastructure, signs, etc would end up being worth it because the results wouldn't really change?

Like I'll follow that metric might make more sense in the grand scheme but it feels like it's being applied where necessary anyway and changing would just be a sunk cost for ... what purpose at this point?
 
And how useful is 100 F for "average Low and High daily temperatures the world over", really? That's 38 C, which I can inform you is hot as FUCK. Here we rarely even get 30 C. Sure, in other countries 40 C might not be so rare, but your argument of it being useful the world over falls flat.

Hmm... maybe someone should make a infographic that shows the 0 F - 100 F captioned as "Scientist created scale to emphasis granularity based on observed temperatures in local climate" then another that shows -17 C to 38 C captioned as "some shit that has to do with purified/distilled water?"

Ha, these threads... I'm not sure what it is about Imperial and Metric that gets people so fired up.
 
It puts a fine point on the idea then that this all seems silly because Metric and Imperial in a video game most of the time are:

tenor.gif

More to the point, they're most often both irrelevant.

The problem is that for realistic measurements to matter, everything has to have realistic relativity, and that's rarely the case. Take DOOM for example. If I give you an objective marker that says it's 2 kilometers away, you would think you have a reasonable idea of how far away that is and how long it will take you to get there, right?

There's just one problem: the DOOM Marine zips around at (purely my guess, here) ~50 kph, a completely absurd sustained speed by any human metric, so "2 km" in game doesn't actually have the same relative meaning it would have for you in real life. It's honestly just going to cause you to make some incorrect assumptions. The part that's important is that I show the objective marker's distance counting down in real-time, because watching that you can tell how long it will actually take you to reach it.

This is the case more often than not in games. You might start with gravity coded up as -10 m/s^2 in your physics engine because that's a very reasonable starting point, but some designer's probably going to come in and change it because accelerating that fast is causing objects to clip through each other when falling due to the way you do collisions, or because players liked a "floatier" jump with non-uniform acceleration, or just because the artists really wanted the Leap of Faith to look more dramatic.

The measurements you're given in games are often effectively arbitrary as a result (and indeed, under the hood they're rarely being measured in real units anyway, rather than things like completely arbitrary game scales). It's generally more important how you communicate the information to the player (going back to our objective marker, the fact that the distance updates itself in real-time, for example) than exactly what the information is you're giving them.
 

Theonik

Member
Hmm... maybe someone should make a infographic that shows the 0 F - 100 F captioned as "Scientist created scale to emphasis granularity based on observed temperatures in local climate" then another that shows -17 C to 38 C captioned as "some shit that has to do with purified/distilled water?"
Farenheit was defined with 0 being the melting point of brine, and 100 being the body temperature of the guy's wife. At least Celsius chose to use the state transitions of one material as a scale.
It's adoption or rather its abandonment was because for a while it was painful to reproduce the scale which made manufacturing instruments a pain.
 

lyrick

Member
Farenheit was defined with 0 being the melting point of brine, and 100 being the body temperature of the guy's wife. At least Celsius chose to use the state transitions of one material as a scale.

Brine makes more sense than pure water, how much of the world is covered with pure water?

I don't know about the world, but Neogaf is always covered in salt, so brine makes more sense.

One Gold sticker on order sir.
 

marmoka

Banned
Even if we did convert, I'm not sure the billions we'd spend in updating infrastructure, signs, etc would end up being worth it because the results wouldn't really change?

Like I'll follow that metric might make more sense in the grand scheme but it feels like it's being applied where necessary anyway and changing would just be a sunk cost for ... what purpose at this point?

On using the same standard units of measurement the rest of the world uses? I know changes and adaptations are hard, specially for old people, but you can do it.

I don't believe the costs would be so big. Perhaps with traffic signs, but nowadays everything works with computers, so just removing the conversion from C to F and from metric to imperial on electronic stuff should be piece of cake.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Farenheit was defined with 0 being the melting point of brine, and 100 being the body temperature of the guy's wife.

And these days it's defined by - *drumroll* - the freezing and boiling points of water, at 32 and 212 degrees.

0 F doesn't mean shit. It's about -18 C, which is... nothing? Just pretty cold. Negative or positive temperatures mean nothing. It's astounding how people refuse to realize how much more useful 0 = freezing is.
 
On using the same standard units of measurement the rest of the world uses? I know changes and adaptations are hard, specially for old people, but you can do it.

I don't believe the costs would be so big. Perhaps with traffic signs, but nowadays everything works with computers, so just removing the conversion from C to F and from metric to imperial on electronic stuff should be piece of cake.

I mean yah when you minimize or eliminate the realities of what you're proposing everything is easy.
 
On using the same standard units of measurement the rest of the world uses? I know changes and adaptations are hard, specially for old people, but you can do it.

I don't believe the costs would be so big. Perhaps with traffic signs, but nowadays everything works with computers, so just removing the conversion from C to F and from metric to imperial on electronic stuff should be piece of cake.

The conversion wouldn't be hard to understand; that wasn't the point.

But the costs would be huge! Ever jug of milk, every can of soda, every box of cereal, every traffic sign, every gas pump... The list goes on. All of it would change. And that's just labeling. You're probably not going to just slap a label on a container of milk containing 3.785 liters of milk; you're probably going to make it a package with a more rounded number. So is all the packing going to need to be redone? The factory lines? And then we get to the psychological aspect of, "What is a liter of gas worth?"

And we could do all that. It could all happen, even if some of it would take time and great cost.

But why? What's the benefit? To the people making the change? To the world at large?
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Pretty sure Europeans specifically insist on day/month/year (East Asia, Japan for certain, taking a third option and going for year/month/day).

We absolutely don't here in Sweden at least. The standard used here is YYYY-MM-DD. In less formal contexts we use DD/MM YYYY or DD/MM -YY. Today is 24/7 -17. Or, in more speech-like texts, 24 July 2017.
 

Theonik

Member
Brine makes more sense than pure water, how much of the world is covered with pure water?
Well to be more precise it was a solution of water, ice, and Ammonium Chloride, that was chosen because the solution stabilises in that temperature if formulated correctly but that was a challenge at the time. This is not really comparable with any in any normal situation. Most fresh water will freeze at 0ºC, sea water freezes at -2ºC. (Or 100ºC when Celsius was alive as the scale was in reverse)

There is of course different accounts that claim that Farenheit used the coldest temperature he recorded in the winter in Danzig. There is much dispute over just how daft the scale was.
 

Peroroncino

Member
I too get all my facts and talking points from videogames instead of real world usage

He's not wrong though. US military heavily depends on metric system, apart from the obvious fact that it's better [duh], in this case it streamlines the eventual joint operations with allied forces from different countries.

Similarly with their gear, most of it follows the guidelines of nato, that's why you see a lot of calibers measured in millimeters instead of inches - there are few exceptions of course, but the majority speaks for itself.
 

Theonik

Member
Might be worth wondering why a Japanese game should "translate" into imperial at all then.
Because they re-write the script with the US market in mind. There is less sense to make two English scripts and the game i18n system might not support such distinction.
 

balohna

Member
Because they re-write the script with the US market in mind. There is less sense to make two English scripts and the game i18n system might not support such distinction.
So they're accommodating a market and making things more relatable and readable to a segment of the audience. Same reason it makes sense to allow for metric units in English. In both cases it doesn't make the game necessarily more or less enjoyable, which was the question I was replying to. I was just trying to rephrase it in a less America-centric context.

Though, the US is the biggest overall English-language gaming market.
 
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