Too soon from quench to temper?

[Retired Spook]

How much is 1/2 of 7feet 3 and 9/36inches ???

3' 7-5/8"

 

[Alex Topfer]

There would be some changes to make and land deeds to adjust, but by the early 1800's we would have been free from the English tyranny of measurement.

People seem to get used to it quickly. Here in Australia we changed over in the 1970s, and 20 years later when i was a kid it was all metric. We did keep imperial beer sizes, just specified in metric, so that probably helped

 

[daily_grind]

I've heard Fahrenheit people say that getting the local weather temperatures in Celsius is too much of a strain. Doubling Celsius and adding 30 gets you very close to Fahrenheit. For instance: 25 °C * 2 + 30 ≈ 80 °F, and it is *actually* 9/5 * 25 °C + 32 = 77 °F (off by 3, not bad).

A meter is roughly a yard, a centimeter is roughly half an inch, kilogram is *very* roughly 2 pounds (really about 2.2).

Also, peace is not established when everyone moves to metric units - then you have engineers arguing about CGS (centimeter-gram-second) unit systems or MKS (meter-kilogram-second) units ... or even worse, the Gaussian unit system, where people change the definition of units to make equations look nicer ... still plenty of irk to go around even then

 

[me2]

Measurement systems are arbitrary. Just pick one and stick with it. If you want to compare results to someone else, figure out what they use and use that or convert their results.

 

[GRapp]

Measurement systems are arbitrary. Just pick one and stick with it. If you want to compare results to someone else, figure out what they use and use that or convert their results.

Your statement is true, however, time is a concern. If a tanker ports and claims it carries xyz of crude, the time it takes to convert units is insignificant. If I'm shooting a match and have 2 minutes to score hits on targets at different distances doing the math in MOA vs MIL is harder/slower. Distances, if provided, are always in yards (in the US). Of course I can do the conversions, but time is a concern.

 

[Drew Riley]

How much is 1/2 of 7feet 3 and 9/36inches ??? Who knows?

Ah... that pesky 36th of an inch. It can tend to add a second or two to the calculation, but the answer is 43-5/8", or 43.625", or 3ft 7 and 5/8", or if you want to get really wacky with yard stick, it's 3.63541667 feet. That last 7/100 millionths of a foot might be a little hard to read on your standard Stanley tape measure though...

I suppose metric is a little easier to do in the head, but math is math at the end of the day, and it's all relative to whatever yardstick (or meter stick) you're using. If you like dividing by 10, just get a machinist's scale. Or better yet, get a caliper or a micrometer and you can do your arithmetic in thousandths.

I once worked at an American steel mill that was owned by Russians. When reading an coil schedule, there were times they'd measure a coil's thickness in millimeters, the width in inches, and the length in feet! Talk about confusing. Don't even get me started on metric tons.... (or tonnes)