That is why it is minor problem.
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Will the US ever switch to the metric system?
- Thread starter fluffydelusions
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That is why it is minor problem.
Jake Tower
Banned
Just as illogical as the imperial system. Date should be, as it's numbers, in a logical order like this :
Day, Month, Year (see the patern ? It's going up in lenght)
or Year, Month, Day
What time is it right now?
FO-totality
Poet Centuriate
It's because Fahrenheit's 100 is based off an old number for human body temp, so the number can have a tendency to fit weather well.
Though any temp system is worthless next to Kelvin.
Theonik
Member
Jake Tower
Banned
Kilogram is a unit of mass, not weight.
poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
Standard system?
Gas is measured in gallons, engine size in liters, used to be measured in cubic inches.
You Are Viewtiful
Member
21:29:15
poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
Diprosalic
Banned
keep it up my american bros, always trying to be different. just like us.
#hipstercountries
#hipstercountries
FO-totality
Poet Centuriate
Time is relative
itwasTuesday
He wasn't alone.
We use it all, go to any hospital or manufacturer of anything.
~Devil Trigger~
In favor of setting Muslim women on fire
You have to post the picture dude.
srsly
If anyone thinks Fahrenheit is not more logical the those 2 others nonsense, your fuckin high
Meh, English is weird like that. You are correct, but weight is the accepted word to use in non scientific contexts when discussing mass.
Nah bro, anyone who uses 0-100 as a universal scale and expects it to make sense is high as fuck.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Wouldn't it make more sense for it to be 30:9!? Seriously guys
Only if you never write seconds, or put seconds first.
Haha, ok that's hilarious
Jokes on you because we don't use the imperial system.
This is annoyingly overlooked or unknown to most foreigners. I'm not sure if any high school student can pass science courses without knowing the metric system to some degree, but what of it? Unless you're going into a technical degree you'd likely just use the customary system. Even if you forget it you can look it up. If you are going into a technical degree you would know.
Sheesh, how is it a big deal.
1cm is 1cm must be hilarious too. We're no closeted units; we know the rest of the world uses the metric system and therefore we need to define it in terms that people who don't use it every day will understand.
This is annoyingly overlooked or unknown to most foreigners. I'm not sure if any high school student can pass science courses without knowing the metric system to some degree, but what of it? Unless you're going into a technical degree you'd likely just use the customary system. Even if you forget it you can look it up. If you are going into a technical degree you would know.
Sheesh, how is it a big deal.
1cm is 1cm must be hilarious too. We're no closeted units; we know the rest of the world uses the metric system and therefore we need to define it in terms that people who don't use it every day will understand.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
The no bullshit assessment of the situation is as follows. Switching to Metric won't improve things a great deal. It's logically superior, but impact on quality of life is negligible given that it's already used in scientific contexts. Of course, people should be willing to make the switch regardless, and the immense resistance to change is a symptom of the kind of cultural conservatism that a lot of people fight against whenever there's a political discussion about almost anything. The argument brought up here vis a vis 24 hour time and Year/Month/Day vs Day/Month/Year are things that everybody should keep in mind. YMD is indeed better than DMY because it makes alphabetical-sorting equivalent to date-sorting, and makes date-sorted things look considerably neater on the page. Big change? Big impact on quality of life? Fuck no! But it is better. 24 hour time eliminates all ambiguity, and is something that everybody should hope to shift to eventually. I should think, however, that many people supporting Metric in this thread would not be supporting a nation-wide shift to 24 hour time and YMD, for probably the same reason that Americans are resisting the shift to Metric and DMY in this thread. It's not something uniquely stupid about Americans, although I do wonder if there are cultural or political differences that resulted in a lot of the seemingly unassailable institutions in America that just make the rest of the world shake their heads (violent opposition to good healthcare system, electoral college and first-past-the-post silliness are the things that come to mind outside of Imperial/MDY format).
Bitmap Frogs
Mr. Community
Don't you cook?
Meh... it's debatable
You could use hh:mm:ss as 11:50:18 which is from bigger quantities of time to tinier
or use ss:mm:hh as 18:50:11 which is from tinier quantity of time to bigger
Even if one is the opposite of the other it still make sense, if we should use the same way americans use the dates it would be 50(minutes):18(seconds):11(hours) tell me how the fuck this have any sense.
Actually if you see aside americans that doesn't want to change anything in this thread there are people that are okay to change to YMD (me included), the 24 hours time then for us it isn't even a problem 'cause we use both since it is very easy to switch between them but maybe it's only a thing of where i live and not in the rest of Europe/world.
212 and 32 aren't that hard to remember.
We are the land of the free and home of the slaves. Would we wanna have it any other way?
Synth_floyd
Banned
Metric is better but people aren't gonna change because metric is European, socialist, atheist, gummint tyranny, etc.
megarockexe
Member
Just as illogical as the imperial system. Date should be, as it's numbers, in a logical order like this :
Day, Month, Year (see the patern ? It's going up in lenght)
or Year, Month, Day
Every time I see that graphic, I imagine how non-US date visually looks like. 30/2/12 sure looks a lot like that pyramid. There are less months than there are days, so why is the day piece smaller?
ReturnOfTheRAT
Member
In online reviews, Day/Month/Year throws people for a loop when they receive their imported European chocolates or candy.
Hour/minute/second, just like year/month/day.
Joke?
Are you sure you took science?
Just as illogical as the imperial system. Date should be, as it's numbers, in a logical order like this :
Day, Month, Year (see the patern ? It's going up in lenght)
or Year, Month, Day
Here is the Logic to Moth/Day/Year.
Month: [01-12]
Day: [01-31]
Year: [00-99]
They are ordered by their maximum range.
You can even stack the whole thing. YYYY/MM/DD-HH:mm:SS
speculawyer
Member
Yes, we will. At some point enough old farts will die and enough immigrants will support it.
Rationality will ultimately prevail over pig-headed stubbornness.
Rationality will ultimately prevail over pig-headed stubbornness.
Jack Scofield
Member
No, he's asking a legitimate question. The graph implies that Americans are wrong, and we have the date out-of-order. But months should be the smallest piece of the pyramid, since there are only twelve. Days would be the middle piece, since there's more than twelve, but less than the amount of years, the base of the pyramid.
MrPing1000
Member
As British subject, it pisses me off that we still use both.
My mind is confused as fuck.
I know what a millimetre, a centimetre and a metre are. Learnt them in school. I have no idea mentally how big a kilometre is. All our road signs are in miles and car speeds are thus known in miles per hour. I couldn't tell you how big a mile was, Just know vaguely based distances of places from my house. To make it even more confusing, I'm in Northern Ireland. The Republic of Ireland is metric, so all their distances and speeds are in km. Fun when you go over the border.
I'm just under 6ft 2 inches. I've no idea what that is in metres.
Soft drinks, are all millilitres and litres. Up until like 2 years ago, milk used to still be pints. Now it's ml and L too. Beer is pints and half pints. Petrol is in gallons.
Sugar is grams and kilograms. Meat is pounds. Fruit and veg can be either. I know what I weigh in stones and pounds. No idea what it is in kg.
Wish we had gone full metric instead of half assing it in the late 70s/80s.
My mind is confused as fuck.
I know what a millimetre, a centimetre and a metre are. Learnt them in school. I have no idea mentally how big a kilometre is. All our road signs are in miles and car speeds are thus known in miles per hour. I couldn't tell you how big a mile was, Just know vaguely based distances of places from my house. To make it even more confusing, I'm in Northern Ireland. The Republic of Ireland is metric, so all their distances and speeds are in km. Fun when you go over the border.
I'm just under 6ft 2 inches. I've no idea what that is in metres.
Soft drinks, are all millilitres and litres. Up until like 2 years ago, milk used to still be pints. Now it's ml and L too. Beer is pints and half pints. Petrol is in gallons.
Sugar is grams and kilograms. Meat is pounds. Fruit and veg can be either. I know what I weigh in stones and pounds. No idea what it is in kg.
Wish we had gone full metric instead of half assing it in the late 70s/80s.
speculawyer
Member
It makes no sense at all to order by maximum range rather than the granularity. By that same logic you would say "253 yd, 9 in, 2 ft, 9 mi" instead of "9 mi, 253 yd, 2 ft, 9 in" but obviously that's not the case.
Most likely there's no logic to it and the date format gradually just changed to match the way it's said in conversation.
Why would you order by the range of each segment? That makes no sense at all.
Jack Scofield
Member
Ordering the date MMDDYY is the most efficient way of conveying information. Labeling the month first immediately narrows down the date to one of twelve months, and the day serves as further granularity.
It doesn't make any sense the other way around. It's like going backwards.
That would make sense if you used the 2012/12/31 format, but you don't.
Except you don't get a great deal of information from just the month. In fact, I cannot think of any circumstance where knowing the month a micro second before they day is of benefit. It is an utter reach. The month by it self is of value, but you are trying to say there is more utility in MMDD than DDMM. Ridiculous. If you want to make that argument, you need to at least place the year at the start. Then you have a consistent argument.
helloresolven
Member
Um, no?
It's Month/Day/Year, because that's how we say dates in the US. It's October 6th, 2012. 10/6/12. Simple as that. If we spoke a variant of English where we said "6th of October, 2012" daily, we'd use Day/Month/Year.
And Americans fully understand/use the Year-Month-Day format and everyone who is sorting by date uses that anyways.
The 6th of October is October 6. Not October 6th. It's a trivial and pedantic point, but this seems to be a fairly trivial and pedantic argument. I hope you don't mind.
Actually, following that pattern it should be like this:
1 - one
10 - ten
100 - hundred
1,000 - thousand
10,000 - ten thousand
100,000 - hundred thousand
1,000,000 - million
10,000,000 - ten million
100,000,000 - hundred million
1,000,000,000 - thousand million
10,000,000,000 - ten thousand million
100,000,000,000 - hundred thousand million
1,000,000,000,000 - Billion (or million million)
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