"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
I'm just as guilty as the next person when I post numbers. Occasionally, I'll also show metric. However, as an old(er) dog, my first instinct is to use feet, miles, etc.
Perhaps we should agree to use only the metric system on HN?
As a younger person who predominantly uses metric - as long as there's a conversion I don't see the issue. Just list both. I'm not sure why the sight of imperial units makes some people irrationally angry.
It’s helpful when there’s only one system. In the US, it’s too costly to switch. HN readers are global and we’re technical so there’s no reason not to simply use metric.
It's a mistake that sometimes even Americans do, but the USA uses the US customary units system, which is closely related, but slightly different to the British imperial system.
In my country, NZ, we refer to beer as pints, and order them as such, but a pint isn't a legal unit of measurement, so it's accepted that your pint will vary. The good establishments have a chart on the wall explaining how many millilitres map to their "pint". And a pint of high alcohol beer will often be less than a pint of average alcohol beer. 473mL vs 568mL typically.
It's not illegal to serve someone a "pint" if they ask for one, but it is illegal to offer a "pint" for sale.
So at the same establishment you could order two pints of beer and the high ABV one would be smaller in volume? That would really bother me or anyone calculating the unit cost of ethanol.
Tucker Carlson:
God bless you, and that's exactly what it is. Esperanto died, but the metric system continues, this weird, utopian, inelegant creepy system that we alone have resisted.
I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units. Fuel is sold in litres but consumption measured in miles per gallon. Milk is sold in 1 pint or 2/4/6 litre bottles. Road signs to towns are in miles but in roadworks are in metres. And so on.
Yeah, the strange half-transition to metric in the UK is really odd. I'm from Australia, another Commonwealth country, and we're -entirely- metric here. The only thing I can think of is that people still talk about height of people in feet and inches, but on official forms it's in centimetres.
I wonder why the UK couldn't quite make the jump over?
To be fair, from my reading of the article, this was a metric-to-imperial conversion problem, meaning McLaren was used to working in metric, but the Indy 500 is in the USA, which uses the backwards and archaic US customary units, so someone screwed up in converting to those. This could have happened to any non-American racing team, and doesn't serve at all as an example of Brits sticking with obsolete units, but rather the opposite.
It does seem that McLaren made a lot of boneheaded mistakes here, but this example just doesn't go with the "Brits are still using imperial units" theme of this thread at all.
Not really. The problem with the Mars lander (not orbiter, it was a lander that crashed) was that they got some data from a defense contractor (Lockheed Martin I think) which was in imperial units, and then NASA assumed it to be in metric units. Both sides made a stupid mistake here: the contractor didn't even provide any units at all on the data sheet they provided, and NASA didn't bother to ask, and just assumed some units. IIRC, these weren't some simple 1-dimensional unit like meters or liters, they were some compound unit (like lb-ft/N-m), so it was a stupid mistake, because even if you have metric units, you don't know if, for instance, there's some prefix, such as kilograms instead of grams, kiloNewton-meters instead of N-m, etc. It was really unbelievable IMO that they just took a bunch of bare numbers and assumed them to have some units associated.
Humans, in general, do not use "feet" for measurement. It's only dumb Americans. They don't represent humanity: they're only a small fraction of all humans (around 4%). Don't blame humanity for something that only Americans do.
I went all metric when we started the new millennium. I try to do all my personal measurements in metric. It has been my own personal battle to make progress, every little bit helps..
It's funny how life fights with you though. My wife and I share a scale in the bathroom, it's a fitbit wifi thing and she finally laid down the law, it uses pounds now. Chasing 130lbs is somehow more satisfying than 58.9 or 59Kg. Our electronic outdoor thermometer is in Fahrenheit now too; this one sort of pisses me off, metric is simple, below 10 you need a coat, 10 to 20 probably want a light jacket, 30+ is shorts because it's hot. Mind you, she is an actual scientist, a real deal scientist that works on viruses and immunology, which is somewhat frustrating. You wouldn't believe the fit she had when our electronic human thermometer was found to be metric... When you call the doctor because your child has a fever, it is better to use whatever units the doctor uses.
I suspect that major new papers could probably start using metric units with translation in parens and only the wingnuts that think the papers already harbor a liberal bias would say anything about it. Other than temperature and like human height, you can toss out metric measurements to most folks when they ask something and they seem to absorb it well; from time to time you get a question or push-back, rarely I'll translate the unit for them. We're at the point where people just need to see it more. It would be an interesting experiment if some media organizations started to make metric more prominent. Hell the US military uses it, mostly for NATO reasons... we could probably somehow put a patriotic spin on it.
> Chasing 130lbs is somehow more satisfying than 58.9 or 59Kg.
I mean, chasing 60kg is more satisfying than 132.2lbs. There's nothing intrinsically important about 130lbs except that it's a round number in base 10. In metric you just pick a different round number to chase.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html