I've said, since Canada adopted the metric system in the 1970s, that it sucks. It is a stupid French utopian idea, and I hate it.
At a very basic level, metric doesn't mean anything to me. How big is a centimeter? I have to check every single time. It has no meaning, it's an arbitrary thing.
Imperial is based on real things. How big is an inch? My thumb, pretty much. My foot is about a foot. My stride is about six feet. Close enough to get me in the ballpark, anyway. Weights and measures are the same thing. An ounce, a quart, a pint, these are every-day amounts of things you use in food etc. A pound is roughly how much bacon you want for family breakfast. A kilogram is 2.2 times as much as you want, which is stupid.
How much is a milliliter? Um, who cares? I'm not a doctor, I don't titrate drugs in exact amounts. I'm not a machinist, 1/64th" is about the finest measurement I ever need. If I need to do better I get out the micrometer and do things in thousandths. Which is decimal not fraction, just like metric right? The only difference is 1/1000 of something I know instead of 1/100 of something I don't.
But I am constantly told I am a troglodyte and I must get with the Modern Age. Because... well no reason, really. Just because. Shut up, old man.
If you had to estimate the dimensions of a room without the benefit of a tape measure, you might walk its perimeter heel to toe, counting your steps. To estimate the height of a wall, you might count hand spans from floor to ceiling. In doing so, you'd join a long human tradition. Most human societies around the word—perhaps all—have employed similar body-based measurement strategies, according to a first-of-its-kind study published today in Science. And these informal body-based systems can persist for centuries after a culture has introduced standardized units of measure because, the authors argue, they often lead to more ergonomic designs of tools, clothing, and other personalized items.
"Nobody has ever done this kind of systematic, cross-cultural study of body-based measurement before," says Stephen Chrisomalis, an anthropologist of mathematics at Wayne State University who penned an editorial accompanying the new paper. "It brings together a huge amount of data that [show] not just how common they are, but that they tend to fall along certain patterns. That is actually an extraordinarily important finding."
Everybody, all over the world, throughout history, used the hand, the foot, the span, the yard, etc. Only the French were so ridiculous to invent a system that relates to nothing. The meter is the length that it is because some guy said so, and for no other reason (and he made it that way because it wasn't a yard.) A yard at least started as the distance from the king's nose to his outstretched index finger, which is something.
If you are making any object for use by human beings, be it a chair, a spoon, a car, the human body dictates the design. The proportions of the body also dictate artistic sensibility. If the proportions conform roughly to those of the human body the thing will be appealing. If they do not, it will be ugly. Which makes a yard or a foot useful information. A yard is how far your arm can reach. A shoe is a foot long.
That this is news to the academic world, an "extraordinarily important finding" quoth the authors, seems to me to represent an abject failure of the education system as a whole.
It seems as if none of these people studying these things has ever made anything with their hands. If they had, they'd know you don't proceed to make a thing by manufacturing all the parts to a listed tolerance. You start with what the thing is for. From there you decide how big the parts are. Then you proceed in logical fashion from the most awkward part to the easiest.
Chair seat first, then the holes for the legs, trim the legs to fit the holes (because it is EASIER to trim the leg than to trim the hole), then the leg braces, then the back, then the arms, etc. Each piece is measured from the previous piece, or from the body of the person who is going to sit on it.
Tables, chairs, boats, all made the same way, each one unique. Because it doesn't matter if no two are the same. It only matters if it fits the person it was made for.
Making a standardized object in a factory out of standardized, interchangeable parts is a profoundly unnatural process and only began in the 19th Century. Such a process requires all kinds of things that had never been required before. Two of those things were accuracy and precision of physical dimensions. The tapered pin that goes into the tapered hole must be accurate to within a few thousandths of an inch for diameter, roundness, taper and length. In the 18th century such things could not even be measured. In the 19th they were commonly being produced in lots of ten thousand. The Singer sewing machine, patented in 1851, is an example of a device that would have been impossible to make at all 100 years before.
But no one in Academia these days seems to appreciate what that means. Even the notion of measuring by rule of thumb does not occur to them, apparently. What did they do when they built those sailing ships to cross the Atlantic the first few times? Inch, foot, yard, fathom. That's what. We're humans. That's how we do it.
Except the French, whose one driving need throughout history is that they have to be different.
I recall chatting with some Canadians several years ago about the temp, and they were all saying pretty much the same thing:
ReplyDelete"OK, so they say it's 28C out, but is that hot, is it cold, do I need a sweater, should I be wearing shorts? Tell me it's 82F and then I know, shorts, t-shirt, and not much else."
Even more fun, several of them said they regularly converted C to F to figure out the temp.
Where the metric system does shine is in science, because of how easy it is to convert between units. Put one volt of potential across a circuit that will draw one amp, and you have one watt of power. Put one kilovolt of potential across that circuit, and you have one kilowatt. Redesign the circuit so that it draws half an amp, and you have half a kilowatt. And so on. The fact that nearly every unit is defined in terms of other units means you can do multi-unit calculations trivially.
ReplyDeleteIn any kind of crafting work, however, you don't need multi-unit calculations. There, you often want units that make sense to the human body. And furthermore, you often want to be dividing your units by some kind of fraction, which is why having 12 inches in the foot is brilliant. Base 12 is far superior to base 10 if you're going to be dividing by 3 or 6, which comes up quite often in crafting.
Metric for science, imperial for daily life including practical crafting work. That's the right way to use those two unit systems.
Signed, Robin Munn (whose Google account persistently shows as Unknown in Blogger)
I Disagree. There are a bunch of common equations derived from experimentation that don't work in Metric without contortions.
DeleteMost of engineering was developed in English units and then converted.
Look in a supermarket and see how many odd or awkward measurements are simple round numbers in English units and how few go the other way.
I agree - the Metric System (which they don't even call it anymore, now its the SI) is to me impractical and basically an overused legacy of Napoleon's attempt to break with other countries in every way he could - he tried to redo the calendar, days of the week, hours of the day, and more.
ReplyDeleteDespite what proponents say, there is nothing inherently better about a base of 10 instead of 12 or 16; it is all a question of what you're used to.
Some of the ways the SI is supposed to be used border on ridiculous these day - for example, the "official" method is to use millimeters for all measurements, which means that for anything of more than moderate size, you end up with very large numbers and it is easy to loose track of the decimal places involved!
Personally I think the whole thing is down to people being snooty.
ReplyDeleteThe French started the sales job by convincing everyone the Meter is a holy length derived from the Earth itself. The sales job continues to this day with all the pointed heads telling us that base 10 is more sciency, and the SI system is "better" than the system that invented the electric light, the atomic bomb, and sent guys to the moon.
But the proper size for a dining table is still the distance your wife can easily reach to put down a dinner plate. Also wide enough that the people on both sides don't bang their knees together. That distance, by the miracle of Imperial measurement, is about two foot and a half feet. Give or take a few thumb widths, depending on the wife and the foot in question.
So you have to wonder about the utility of quibbling about how many parts of the distance between the pole and the equator of the Earth when you are making stuff for human beings to use.
As to the sciencyness, when you're talking about light years in space or on the other end of the scale the wavelength of light, does it -really- matter if its miles or kilometers? Decimal inches or decimal meters?
Something else that is interesting. I just has a go at finding out the Imperial measurements that were used for science, such as what they called an Angstrom or a nanometer in Imperial measure. There -is- a unit for that, but a search failed to turn it up.
Knowledge being destroyed by careless snobbery? Could be.