Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/books/2014/08/john_marciano_s_whatever_happened_to_the_metric_system_reviewed.single.html <comment><USER3> I have some difficulties with the issues described in the piece.

"A yard is the distance from your sternum to the tip of your outstretched hand."

According to folk belief, it's the distance from the tip of Henry I's nose to the end of his thumb. According to an early definition, "It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard."

Who here has an idea of the size of a grain of barley dry and round?

At 39.3 inches, a meter is just slightly longer than a yard, and for "traditional purposes" where the sternum/fingertip approximation is good enough, a meter and a yard can be used almost interchangeably.

Somehow all those people using metric in their daily lives don't feel like they are missing something special by having "ancient, organic" units. (BTW, at what point does something become "ancient"?)

"Or don't bother, because the definition completely changed in 1960"

The yard definition 'completely changed' in 1959, when it defined as exactly 0.9144 meters. Before then it was different in different countries.

Since the yard is pegged to the meter, this means that the yard is now legally defined as the time light travels in 1/274130223.5952 seconds.

"The first third of the 20th century, for instance, saw some quite serious efforts to rationalize our systems for dates and times."

As well as the 1700s, when France ran under a rationalized calendar, which provided the name for the Thermidorian Reaction. This is part of the same movement that brought us the metric system, so I think it's odd to exclude that very serious effort.

<comment><USER4> UK: we work in Imperial but things are officially priced in metric, except for beer. Petrol is in pence/litre. So you get price per lb and per kg. Lengths are in millimetres on builders plans (to avoid mistakes with decimal points) but road signs are in miles. Makes teaching basic maths to adults a bit more fun...

[http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_market-metric- proportion...](http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_market-metric- proportion.html)

You would be surprised how many people have issues with decimal place notation still. The low denominator fractions make a lot of sense for a lot of people. French speaking African students of mine will naturally price food in half and quarter kilos.

<comment><USER5> It depends a huge amount on age. Younger people in the UK use metric except where imperial is already the de-facto standard (pints, MpH, etc).

It is really just older generations who continue to use imperial and to push it all over the place (often inappropriately).

At least all food labeling has been standardised on metric (which honestly for cooking and monitoring food intake is a huge improvement). I can like with other areas remaining oddly imperial for now.

I just hope as the older generation disappear we start moving closer and closer to true metrification (I'd even want to see km/h so it is consistent with continental europe).

<comment><USER4> _" Younger people in the UK use metric except where imperial is already the de-facto standard (pints, MpH, etc)."_

News to me. I teach a few hundred 17-19 year olds each year. They are very hazy about _any_ form of actual measurement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not anti-metric by any means, but having done carpentry a lot in the past it always strikes me when this comes up that one of the central arguments for (a limited use-case of) the imperial system is usually glossed over: the fact that in many crafts (especially historically), using base-12 makes certain things much easier. It divides into 3rds far more easily, divides into 4ths slightly more easily, and still divides into 5ths with only one digit after the decimal.

Just like computer programmers have no problem immediately recognizing that 256 is 2^8, it became intuitive when working with the Imperial system (at limited scales) that 48 inches is the same as 4-feet but that it is also 3-stud-distances long (studs in walls are often placed 16 inches apart).

Even if you don't work in crafts where dividing things by 3 is more frequent than dividing by 5 it is easy to imagine how certain things might be more difficult if we used base-10 for time (as, it has been pointed out, has been attempted)- and thereby using the ability to easily divide an hour into 3 parts (for example).

Consistent base-10 and international standardization has advantages that far outweigh these minor things- but I think it's important to recognize that there is, surprise, a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units- it's not purely tradition or politics or their "organic-ness" (anymore).

<comment><USER7> >a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units

That to me is the worst of both worlds. The optimal solution is to use one consistent system and the winner is pretty clear.

>carpentry

Certainly. The future is full of 3D printers though.

<comment><USER8> I strongly disagree. Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. In a math course, you'd measure angles in radians so you're dealing with nice small multiples of pi. I think it'd be downright dangerous to use radians in a fighter jet, say, when the precision you need is much better provided by degrees.

Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalent. Or if we demanded that logicians and cs professors only prove things using turing machines, instead of picking the model of computation that best suits the problem. If there's a case where the english measurement system is more convenient, people should use it.

<comment><USER7> >Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency.

Except units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information. And when each person feels the need to enforce their own version of "right tool for right job" then things like the mars orbiter incident happen.

>Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalent.

Hardly. A better analogy would be to enforce identical calling parameters for DLLs libraries across all languages. That would benefit all languages and improve interoperability.

<comment><USER8> >units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information.

How you communicate information is important and has real impacts. Given a graph, you could choose to encode it as an adjacency matrix or as a collection of adjacency lists. Both convey the same information, but nobody would say we should pick one and only one. I disagree with the assertion that measurement units aren't tools or that they are exempt from similar consideration.

Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. That shouldn't affect carpenters who need divisibility by 2, 3 and 4 more than they need 5. Or those who like to use inches because theyre significantly larger than centimeters and consequently easier to approximate by eye.

<comment><USER7> >Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA.

No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA". Remember that the USA is like 4% of the world population. Even if the US contributes 10x more than everyone else per person that still puts the US in the minority. Consistency here is not a "nice to have"...its mission critical.

>That shouldn't affect carpenters

So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different units of measure?

>approximate by eye.

Approximate by eye? Seriously? Intel is aiming at 10 nanometers. Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world. Note...nanometers not nanofeet...this from an American company.

<comment><USER9> > No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole > deal, not "inside NASA".

I think it's a fair bet that when spaceflight becomes widespread and commonplace, we're going to have many discrete groups of people developing, producing, operating, and maintaining their own particular spacecraft independently of each other, and not "humanity as a whole", as a singular undifferentiated mass, working on a single uniform spaceflight project.

Consistency _within_ a specific project is clearly necessary; uniformity _among_ distinct projects is, speaking at the macro level, a liability. Variation is an evolutionary advantage; artificial uniformity slows progress.

> So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different > units of measure?

Why would this even be a question? Should programmers only be familiar with one single programming language? Should people in general only ever learn to speak a single verbal language? Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools, and ignorant of all others?

> Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world.

Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world. It's only in the case of activities on the scale of building spaceships and 10-nm-process integrated circuits that people require the level of precision that you're talking about. The vast majority of human activity remains outside of these domains.

The original article was about American resistance to adopting metric units as a default practice in day-to-day life, and not about the use of the metric system by people engaged in highly specialized disciplines. It'd be a bit absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high-precision work by the small set of people currently working on microprocessor design are necessarily the optimal ones for e.g. baking a cake or tiling your bathroom. In the latter use cases, one could make a very compelling case that units optimized for alignment with intuition are vastly more useful than ones optimized for micro-scale precision.

<comment><USER7> >Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary

I'll concede that it only matters within a project...but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure. Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when pushing for a deadline, but really...

>Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools

Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure. Aside from the odd instance where its easier to divide by X all you're gaining from using many units of measure is chaos.

>Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world.

Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.

>It'd be a bit absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high- precision work by the small set of people currently working on microprocessor design are necessarily the optimal ones for

Absurd indeed, but not what I was getting at. Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age. So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why tech imperial? And even if you could split them, the mix of units of measures employed nationally would be much worse than randomly picking one.

I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for everyone else to under why given this: [http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg)

<comment><USER9> > but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in > their unit of measure.

Obviously, you'd assemble project teams who are familiar with the tools, techniques, and conventions that you intend to use with your project.

> Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM > when pushing for a deadline, but really...

And the Chinese engineer who's working on a project where all of the documentation is in English might slip up when he's punchy at 1 AM and accidentally complete some of his work in Chinese.

This is a good argument for making sure that team members are well-rested and alert while doing their work. It's also a good argument for scheduling work reviews, proofreading, and time for correcting errors in the project plan. It's not at all an argument for abolishing the Chinese language.

> Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure.

Units of measures _are_ tools. Tools are devices, whether physical or conceptual, that we use to extend our capacities for interacting with the world. In this case, since human beings do not natively have the capacity to quantify continuities, we apply the tool of measuring units to break continuities down into discretely countable chunks.

And, like all tools, how well they work depends on what goals you're trying to accomplish, and in what order of priority, in a given set of circumstances. Metric units are great in a limited set of contexts in which uniformity of post-hoc representation is more important than practicality in the activity of measurement itself; but this means that they are, for the same reason, less effective than customary units for the vast majority of situations that involve measurement.

> Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually > when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.

Very few situations are matters of life and death, and in those rare circumstances that _are_ , people will naturally be cautious and rigorous in their methods: I'd expect people to use precise measuring instruments, and to perform measurements multiple times, so in such a situation, questions of familiarity with particular units are scarcely relevant. When you're relying on the precision of instruments, the actual measuring units you're using are less important: metric, imperial, or otherwise, they'll all work just as well.

> Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age

I don't know how much anyone "internalizes" any measuring units, but to the extent that they familiarize themselves with theDefinitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.m, there's certainly no cause to familiarize oneself with only one set, at the exclusion of another.

> So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and > carpenters at that age then why tech imperial?

How about we keep doing things the way we are - teaching everyone both sets of units - and letting them determine for themselves which ones are most useful to them for each particular application?

> I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for > everyone else to under why given this: > [http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg)

All that graphic demonstrates to me is that while, with imperial/customary measures, there are a variety of separate base units to choose from, each appropriate to a particular scale of operation, the metric system only offers one base unit, and pretends that applying a 10^x coefficient to that single base unit somehow makes it a different unit.

That's what you're not getting: feet, yards, inches, etc. are fundamentally distinct units that have been tweaked to relate to each other, where necessary, by factors that are often much more convenient than 10. But you're just as capable with customary units as with metric of sticking with a single unit and applying scaling factors: I can just as easily say e.g. 24.2 x 10^4 feet as 45.83 miles.

I can even use metric prefixes if I'm so inclined, and say 24.2 kilofeet! Or 2.9 megainches! All the same value. But using these prefixes is just a bizarre re-implementation of scientific notation: in what way does it make sense to encode quantitative information as a verbal prefix appended to the name of the thing you're counting, instead of just using numbers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Well, to be fair, those anti-metric folks had at least one point in their > favor: Customary measures make a lot more sense to us.

The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you. This misconception comes up time and time again: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501)

The article seems like fluff; the author isn't even making _novel_ mistakes.

He even says that the metric system "died". Hah. That's true only in a very limited parochial sense; it's the most popular system of measurement on planet earth even if it's isn't used for day-to-day things in the USA.

<comment><USER11> > The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem > natural to you

This is true to at least my case: grew up under the metric system and after 15 years living in the US, still have to mentally convert dimensions to metric in order to make sense of them:

\- If you point at something and ask me how far it is, the first number that comes to my mind is in meters, then I say that number and add "yards" or mentally multiply it by 3 and add "feets"

\- If you ask me to grab something and give you the weight, the number comes in Kg and I mentally multiply it by 2.2 to give and approximate weight in pounds.

<comment><USER12> Just FYI, "feets" isn't a word. The plural of feet is feet :)

Similarly, "softwares" isn't a word either, but I hear it a lot. There's only software.

I say this because it's a common mistake among people who speak well, otherwise.

<comment><USER13> Interestingly, and to my big surprise, "fishes" is quite correct!

<comment><USER14> "fishes" refers to multiple species of fish, while "fish" is the correct plural form of a school of a single species.

<comment><USER13> Awesome!Though, which one should you use if both are correct?

"... plenty of fish(es) in the sea." for instance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love the metric system for no better reasons that it's the one I always used as a french, it just seems as natural for me as my ten fingers, I never really thought about it. Yet, I can understand why some would not change their "English customary measures", they must feel it the same way, thinking it's as natural as their feet. For instance, our screens size (TV, computer, phones) are expressed in inches for whatever good reasons ... I don't have a clue at all about the size it represents, I just know 13 is smaller than 15, 11 is too small for me for a computer screen, and that 42 is a pretty good decent size for a TV. My surfboard is a 6.2, and for all I know, it's taller than me ...

If I were told, we were going to change our measure system, I would be kind of scared, could it be better or worse ! After all, the hardest part is not the real use but the idea of the switch.

Now, if you could just use the international ISO 216 paper size, I wouldn't have to mess with my PDF export settings and just push some A4.

<comment><USER16> Inches to cm and back are actually an easy conversion so thinking in both isn't hard - 2.5cm/in, 30cm/ft. 1.6km/mi and 2.2 lbs/kg are a bit more annoying, and Fahrenheit are a freaking abomination.

<comment><USER17> C is roughly (F - 30)/2, not too bad. To make my life easier I also measure lb as 1/2 kg and driving distances as time.

<comment><USER18> > C is roughly (F - 30)/2, not too bad.

A few months ago, I was concerned about the inaccuracy of this rough conversion. It's actually accurate to within ±3°F for all temperatures -5°C to 25°C (23°F to 77°F). If you're OK with ±5°F, it works for -15°C to 35°C (5°F to 95°F).

So the conversion works pretty well for the vast majority of environmental conditions. C = (F - 30) / 2 and F = C * 2 + 30 are great approximations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Everyone seems to be missing the most obvious reason to convert.

[http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries- who...](http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-who-dont-use- the-metric-system)

We're a global economy. By the ends of the century, India and China will have pushed us down to at least #3.

<comment><USER20> The U.S. uses the metric system and the customary system.

Even many countries that are primarily metric use non-metric units like stones for body weight or feet for airplane elevation.

I agree that metric would be a better system, but your implication that we can't compete in the global economy with our mixed unit system seems hyperbolic since we have already been competing just fine.

<comment><USER21> who uses stones for body weight?

<comment><USER22> The UK and Ireland notably use stones as a measure of body weight.

<comment><USER23> UK use of stones and pounds for weight is informal and declining. Feet and inches for height is also informal but is perhaps more popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For me this is too much rationalization for a single fact: people hate to change, even if it is for the better.

So simple. I study Chinese and I am 100% certain than the reason Chinese did not develop like the West was the printing press and the superior method it is to have to print 25-30 symbols instead of 30.000.

Just look at Chinese and even Japanese delay in getting to use computers as ASCII was so simple compared to their language. Japanese use kanji(chinese symbols) for lots of things.

The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and then the Romans copied the Greeks.

Romans started copying Greek culture because they were so ignorant compared with the Greeks, let alone Chinese at the time.

But at the same time, they started anew.The language was so refined, and it took the best thing of each iteration(better than Greek, better than Indian Scripts, better than Chinese).

I worked with someone doing programming and the fact that I used Vim instead of a visual text editor really infuriated him.

So one day I explained it to him and expended 30 to 40 min teaching him why it was so good for me. He looked confused. One month later he only used vim.

The reason most people don't use programs like vim or emacs is because it takes some effort to learn before you get the benefits.

The same happens with metric or any other measurement system.

<comment><USER25> > The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and > basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and > then the Romans copied the Greeks.

Latin script's origins are in Egypt and Sumer, not in China. Writing was invented in the Near East about 3200BCE and about 1200BCE in China.

<comment><USER24> When I say the Chinese came first I did not want to say that they invented writing.

I am talking about sophistication in language,not just script. Most of the early Egyptian and Sumer writings are very simple accountings, mostly numbers. Very little to do with what we consider writing today.

latin is called an Indo-European language becomes it comes from India. Not just the language, but the race.

<comment><USER25> > I am talking about sophistication in language,not just script. Most of the > early Egyptian and Sumer writings are very simple accountings, mostly > numbers. Very little to do with what we consider writing today.

I guess sophistication is subjective, but a lot of Chinese writing was just record keeping too, and there was literature in Egypt and Sumer, e.g. the Epic of Gilgamesh.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature)

> latin is called an Indo-European language becomes it comes from India. Not > just the language, but the race.

The most popular theory is that the Proto-Indo-European language had its origins in Eastern Europe.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo- European_origins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_origins)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _> Customary measures make a lot more sense to us._

Did they make any less sense in UK where they originated? Yet UK pushed through with switching to metric and went way further than US did. So this excuse isn't really valid.

The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the effort. In UK they just ignored the pressure. In US they budged.

I wish US would already push this through, but so far it doesn't look very promising.

About natural. Take for example Celsius and Fahrenheit. Celsius based his scale on water freezing and boiling points, which are quite intuitive borders. At 0°C weather changes significantly since water freezing / melting has a noticeable environmental impact. So if you see -1° or +1° you can expect quite a change. On the other hand what are 31° and 33°? Fahrenheit took his scale without any pragmatic or practical goals of common usage. He did it for his scientific purposes. People more naturally operate with two digit numbers, which in Celsius case covers most of the normal range temperatures. It's good that at least Kelvin's scale didn't become commonly used in some countries...

<comment><USER27> > The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this > through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them > to stop the effort.

No, the real answer is that US politicians were too weak to push this through, because the people wouldn't have it.

The people spoke.

<comment><USER26> Not people. Lobbying groups. I wouldn't equate the two. Don't tell me in UK people suddenly spoke the opposite. No, most were not comfortable with the change either, but it was a necessary change. The difference is that in UK unions and lobbying groups were less inclined to fight it, because they are more involved in global European market which uses the metric system. It wasn't about people, it was about politicians losing or not losing lobbying support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I started grade school around when the big push for metric occurred in the US. Here's what I remember. Inches were taught as inches. Here's a ruler, measure some things.

Metric was taught as a bunch of math. Here's how you convert between different units.

Many years later I was talking to a machinist who told me: "My daughter is learning metric in school but I don't like it because of all the math."

</comment><comment><USER29> Since our civilization seems to have moved to binary for actual computations I wonder if we will someday go back to thinking in terms of halves, quarters, eighths, etc. of some standard unit. Then people would mock the metric system for being implicitly based on the biological accident of ten fingers...

<comment><USER30> Indeed — you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point, so who in their right mind would try to build a measuring system on tenths?

<comment><USER14> > "you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point"

Not true, the IEEE 754-2008 standard provides a Decimal Floating Point specification in binary.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754-2008_encoding)

<comment><USER30> Ah, well, you're the best kind of correct. IBM even have instructions for it.

I'll counter with the Ferranti Orion (1959) which had _mixed-base_ operations (primarily for £sd accounting).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was born and raised in Europe. I live in Canada that has (mostly) gone metric in the 1970's. Yet, I use inches. They are nicer!

I recently built a shelf and hanger rack in a weirdly-shaped closet. I used Sketchup to design it, and naturally made everything in inches.

Inches are "semi-metric" too, thanks to mils: thousandths of an inch. Mils are very nice units for fine work, like circuit boards. Millimeters are way too crude, and micrometers are outside of macroscopic human experience.

When doing PCB work, I use mils, which create a virtual metric system within the space of an inch. E.g. the pins of old-school DIPs are 100 mils apart, or 0.1" Through holes are in mils: 25 mils, 40 mils. Same for track widths: 8 mils, 10 mils, ... very nice numbers to work with at that scale: one, two or three digits, no decimals.

<comment><USER32> Canadian here as well, but I always thought that we had metric system all along!

I just assumed that everyone was using such standards when I was little and then came things like miles, pounds, yards, foot and I was like wtf, it's so complicated.

I know how long a cm is by pinching my index and thumb finger and measuring the distance between the nails. I know roughly how long is a meter based on my height. I know roughly how long is a km based on my running distance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I see we're still perpetuating the "DVORAK is inherently better than QWERTY" myth, as well as "QWERTY was designed to prevent key-sticking" myth. And I don't want to know what it suggests about the author that he still has Tommy Lee's penis on the brain. _That_ is your go-to inch example?

I had always intuited a higher opinion of Slate, just because I had friends I respected who read it, but the more I actually read it myself, the more it seems barely above the likes of BuzzFeed or HuffPo.

>> "when a foot is 12 inches... it gets tough to do quick mental calculations.'

Except, you know, when you want to easily divide by three or six. Or by two or four and end up with integer results. But why would anyone ever want to do that in normal, day to day living?

<comment><USER3> It doesn't say that Dvorak is better than QWERTY. It links to an article in The Atlantic titled "The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard". Quoting from it, which quotes from elsewhere:

> ... the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were > being used. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who > needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the > alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating > morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved > over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph > operators

That's why the Slate article says "the QWERTY keyboard was designed for a different age (to suit the quirks of telegraph operators)", and does not refer to the myth about key-sticking.

(Personally, I thought the same as you, and it required a closer reading to understand that my thought was incorrect.)

The discussion about mental arithmetic concerns conversions between different scales, like foot and mile, not in fractions of a foot. If you have a surveyor's wheel marked in feet or half-rods and want to measure 1/4 mile -- how long is that?

That said, see my other post for aspects about this article that I didn't like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The article uses "Anyway, we have calculators now" as an argument _for_ decimalization, but I see it as an argument _against_ it. The less people do math on paper (or in their head), the less need we have to tie our system of measurement to the number of fingers the human hand happens to have; calculators divide by 12 as easily as 10.

<comment><USER35> The nice thing about the metric system is that the base is consistent - it's always some multiple of 10. With the imperial system, it gets tricky remembering whether you have to multiply by 12 or 16 or 5280 or whatnot.

<comment><USER34> That objection is growing obsolete, too: Nobody these days divides by 5280; they go to Google and type "1/4 mile in feet"

<comment><USER36> Don't you feel handicapped having to use a computer to express basic distances? In the metric system, you have to have some sort of low IQ not to be able to convert from meters to kilomethers on the fly. Hours to seconds is trickier, and would be much improved by decimal notation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This whole article just feels like fluff. The very first "fact" about the origins of the qwerty keyboard are completely wrong. The Wikipedia page doesn't have a single mention of telegraph and has a complete history of its development. A history can be found in this 1996 article among others [http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing- errors/](http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/).

<comment><USER38> Are the people who link to this libertarian propaganda every time qwerty or Dvorak gets mentioned underhanded libertarians hoping to spread their brand of economic religion or people who have been utterly taken in by the former to the point that they think this is an unbiased debunking?

<comment><USER39> The article points out that: "In April 1990, we published a more detailed version of this material in a Journal of Law and Economics article titled 'The Fable of the Keys.' This journal is well known and has published some of the most influential articles in economics. In the six years since we published that article there has been no attempt to refute any of our factual claims, to discredit the GSA study, or to resurrect the Navy study."

Pointing to Reason is not a valid reason for dismissing an argument that is well known from other sources that are, as a matter of fact, not libertarian.

It would be more interesting if you stopped smearing sources and actually provided -- or at least pointed to -- some rational articles that try to refute the factual case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A yard is currently defined by the metric system.

Metrology is the discipline of measuring. It concerns itself with ensuring that everyone has the same definition of measuring units. For a long time, the yard was based on physical standards. i.e. Somewhere there sat a physical rod 1 yard long that all other rods were measured against to define the yard. The meter was defined this way until 1960 too. The unfortunate problem with physical standards is that they change. A physical rod is different lengths at different temperatures and will, of course, gradually get shorter as it's handled and wear occurs on its ends.

The meter is now defined in terms of how fast light can travel in a given period of time. That period of time is defined in terms of hyperfine ground state level transitions of a Cesium atom. Yes, it's complex. However, while a physical standard changes, these standards are built into the laws of the universe and are thus reproducible and fixed for all time. _For this reason, the yard is currently defined as 0.9144 meters in the U.S.. No matter how the metric system defines the meter, a yard is 0.9144 meters._

So, the U.S. really has gone metric, at least where it counts. The average American is just ignorant of the fact.

P.S. Even the metric system is not completely free of physical definitions... yet. The kilogram is still based on a physical prototype. However, there are proposals to change that to something based on physical constants. Once this is done, the metric system will be defined entirely in terms of physics.

</comment><comment><USER41> The thing about measurements is that they don't matter in your everyday life. I get that it makes physics calculations easier and international machining companies need to interface with the world, but measuring the speed of my car in miles per hour and knowing my couch is 7 1/2 feet long are perfectly fine, and there is absolutely no compelling reason to switch to metric for those kinds of things.

People don't want to switch because it's a huge burden to retrain yourself to think in those units. I remember growing up that the US tried to do it—roadsigns in California had both miles and kilometers on them and our speedometers had both readings for a while. But it didn't stick because there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve anything, it's just churn.

I've got a very intuitive notion of how long a mile is, and Europeans have a very intuitive grasp on how long a kilometer is. It isn't because one system is intuitive and one isn't, it's just what you're used to—you know it because you use it every day.

The article is wrong. Imperial Units are not "better". But, the system you know and use every day _is_ better than the weird foreign system.

As Abe Simpson once said, "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"

<comment><USER42> > But it didn't stick because there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve > anything, it's just churn.

This is pretty much it, though I'd throw on that Europeans acting like they're morally superior for using metric as their native measuring system (and that Americans are intellectually slovenly for not) certainly doesn't do many favors for the cause of metricization in the U.S.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here's my proposal: America goes metric, and the rest of the world starts driving on the right hand side of the road.

<comment><USER44> Can America also adapt Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals? Please.

<comment><USER45> "MUTCD specifies yellow lines between lanes of traffic moving in opposite directions and white lines between lanes moving in the same direction, whereas the Vienna Convention uses white for both." (Wikipedia)

No thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Could you imagine Boeing/lockheed/GM/some some oil company or any other manufacturer going up to their stockholders and saying: "This next year, profits will be significantly reduced as we replace every piece of equipment we own, replace every 1/4-20 screw with an M5, and redesign every aircraft/automobile/widget to meet new metric specifications"

<comment><USER47> It's not like the metric system was invented yesterday and will vanish tommorrow. Change doesn't have to be instantaneous, it can be gradual over the years (and, as the article pointed out, already is)

<comment><USER48> > Change doesn't have to be instantaneous, it can be gradual over the years

As an example, NASA is partially-metric, partially-imperial. Of course, they have that famous failure attributed to mixing units...

<comment><USER49> I did a bit of work at NASA a couple years back, they wanted everything in millimeters (possibly to deal with the aftermath of that incident). Everything. Even antenna lengths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> If I visit Starbucks they sell something called a "Venti" it's part of Starbucks attempt to change the language of coffee so that their regular customers can't order elsewhere.

"Venti" is of course Italian for 20, let's ignore the fact that Starbucks appear to invalidly trademarked a number, when I find myself stuck with a Starbucks in an American airport I love to ask "that's Italian for twenty, twenty what?" the usual answer is "fluid ounces" .... but "that can't be true, Italy uses the metric system, it must be litres or millilitres ..." usually they choose "litres", it is a big cup

Of course the American fluid ounce is a weird thing, different from the Imperial fluid ounce (which is exactly 1oz of water at 62F)- a strange historical thing due more to British Kings monkeying with the tax system than anything else

<comment><USER40> Occasionally people blurt out "venti" in a place that isn't a Starbucks. The staff always knows that means "biggest cup we've got". Conversely, if I order an "extra large" in Starbucks they always force me to pick one of their sizes and say it's freakin' nonsense name. Also, I'm in Canada (a country that uses metric) and they list their sizes in fluid ounces.

<comment><USER51> Is that a Canadian Starbucks thing? In English Starbucks I've never had a problem with asking for a "large" or "medium".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> There's a great video treating imperial measurement units. I instantly fell in love with it: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk)

I landed there after watching one on paper sizes on the same channel. Also pretty much worth it!

</comment><comment><USER53> Relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/526/](http://xkcd.com/526/)

<comment><USER54> What 26C cold to swim? 26C is absolutely warm, around 20C is cold and below 16 is when the balls :freeze:, still doable though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Someone (a jogger/runner?) on reddit a few days ago made an interesting observation, maybe this was known. The Fibonacci sequence can be used as a rough guide to convert km to miles and vice versa.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34

The first four don't work very well but:

3km is about 2 miles

5km is about 3 miles

8km is about 5 miles

13km is about 8 miles

21km is about 13 miles

34km is about 21 miles

and so on

<comment><USER56> Nothing mysterious there; in the Fibonacci sequence, the ratio of the number and the one before it converges to the golden ratio which is almost the same as the conversion rate between km and miles.

I think it is easier to multiply by 0.6. Or do the simpler approximation: n/2 + n/10 + ( n/100 )*2

You can drop the last term if you don't need an accurate result.

Divisions and multiplications by 2, 10 and 100 are really easy.

850km to miles:

425 + 85 + 17 = 527 miles , the correct result is 528.166 miles

258km to miles:

129 + 26 + 5 = 160 miles , correct result is 160.314 miles

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Author wrongly presumes that people using the metric system are not visualizing the measures in almost the same way. We do. One step is about a meter, or the width of finger is about 1 cm. More often used 10 centimeters (1 decimeter) is approx. a distance from your thumb to the index finger. It's all about being used to certain system of measures, so that you can automatically relate the measure to something from the real life for comparison, e.g. my car is 5m long, also the wall in my room is around 5m, so if you ask me how big is 5m I can instantly visualize the distance very accurately (without even consciously thinking about cars or walls)

<comment><USER58> Whereas my foot is ... a foot. My pace is a yard. My thumb is about an inch. Works both ways.

<comment><USER57> absolutely... problem is that I have to think hard to figure out how much a yard is, and you have the same problem with meters. That's what standards are for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> How about "either is arbitrary so fighting over which is better is pointless, just choose the one with higher acceptance."

</comment><comment><USER60> One of the biggest arguments for metric (other than the rest of the world uses it) has been that it is easy to convert from liters to kilometers. In your day to day life, how often do you need to convert from one thing to another? For most people, the answer is they don't. Occasionally in cooking you need to convert, other than that you rarely need to convert. So don't go and switch the system just because something people rarely do is easier. And yes there are lots of jobs that require doing conversions. Many of those jobs already use metric.

<comment><USER61> Converting liters to kilometers? I need to know how to do this! How many beers is a kilometer? Gonna get my jog on.

<comment><USER62> Assuming a 500ml beer... (500ml / 1 km) = 0.5 square millimeters.

For interpretation advice, see also: xkcd. [https://what- if.xkcd.com/11/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/)

<comment> T-hawk This actually has the same physical interpretation, right? If you took 500ml volume of beer and stretched it out to 1 km long, the stretched form would be 0.5 mm^2 in cross-section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I think the "but it's easier to visualize" claim is BS.

I would argue that it's just as hard for a person who's is used to the metric system to visualize inches, feet and yards as it is for a person used to those units to visualize centimeters and meters.

It's all a matter of which units your brain is used to thinking in.

When I speak to my US friends and they say stuff like, "I'm 7 feet and 10 inches tall", I have no internal visual metal picture at all. But if I say, "I'm 193 cm tall" I would guess they don't have either.

<comment><USER54> You have some really tall friends: 7feet,10inches would be uber-tall - 239cm. To convert I use some baselines 5'7 is 170, 6' is 183, then adding/subtracting inches to fit.

<comment><USER63> I think this illustrates my point ;) But since when do I get down-votes for favouring the metric system??

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Centimeter is about 2 grids in a school "checked" notebook. Everybody know after using these notebooks fot the whole education how long exactly that is. No problems with eyeballing. I have problems eyeballing an inch (only used in 5.25 or 3.14 disk sizes and in monitors' sizes).

Milimeter is close to smallest unit useful in human scale - when you try to draw 0.5 milimeter scale with a regular pen, for example, the lines will probably touch each other. You can't cut with regular tools with better than 1mm accuracy, too. Tools are commonly scaled in milimeters, and you can almost use 14 key for 13 screw etc, so no point in smaller units for regular mechanics work either.

Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams). You say "10 deko of this meat, 40 deko of that cheese, and 1 kilo of these berries, please". Somehow hektagram haven't caught up.

Land is measured in ar (10x10 meters), hektar (100x100 meters) and squared kilometers for anything bigger. Flats are measured in squared meters (50-300 m2 for most flats).

1 kg of water (and most other common liquids, with precision good enough for cooking etc) is 1 liter, everybody know that and use them interchangeably. 1 glass is 250 ml is 250 g of most liquids and powders, people measure stuff with glasses when cooking assuming 1 glass = 250 g.

There's a joke about this 1 liter = 1kg assumption. When asked what's 10 times 100g everybody answered 1kg except Russian and Polish who answered 1 liter (because shot glasses of alcohol in pubs are sold as 100g).

1 meter is almost exactly 1 step, 1 km is how far you can walk in 10 minutes.

I don't think one system is better than another in everyday usage, except the much easier calculations in metric.

<comment><USER65> > Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams).

Where? I've lived my whole life in a metric-using country and I'm fairly sure I have literally never heard of that unit until just now...

Our food here is all in grams (i.e. a 100g packet of chips, 300g steak) or kilograms (1.5 kilo bag of rice).

<comment><USER66> In Slovenia, for example, food is measured in decagrams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> From the geek point of view we should really all switch to Planck units of course.

</comment><comment><USER68> I agree the US should fully adopt the metric system, it makes logical sense.

And Europe should abolish about three dozen major languages that should no longer be in use and adopt English (or perhaps Spanish). Why does Bulgaria need its own language? Or Romania, or Sweden? Why does French still exist? We're talking about efficiencies here, right? What's less efficient than people not being able to easily communicate by sharing a common language.

I always get a kick out of bringing this up, because while it's extraordinarily logical to narrow down dozens of languages to one or a few, people lose their minds about it and regard it as a sacred cultural issue that is to never be touched. Whereas converting to the metric system... well but of course, that only makes sense!

<comment><USER69> Please describe the sacred cultural issues around retaining imperial units of measure.

<comment><USER70> I'd be happy to, but it is difficult to understand. For some reason things like changing to metric, in some people's mind, means adapting 'European culture' and is anti-traditionalist. From what I can tell, the same group that holds onto the imperial system is the same group that is upset that cursive writing isn't a mandated subject in schools (how will kids read the constitution) and other such aversion to change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I prefer Imperial but I'd be willing to switch, provided we also switch to a new spelling and time system.

It's funny the same people that make fun of the Imperial system also cling to bad standards because they are more familiar and have a high switching cost.

</comment><comment><USER9> The biggest liability of the metric system to me is its system of unit prefixes: this is just a bizarre reimplementation of scientific notation that expresses the most significant quantitative information not as part of the actual quantitative component of its notation, but as an arcane verbal prefix attached to the name of the thing being counted.

What on earth is the advantage of a notation that makes it easy to scale a value by an order of magnitude without having to alter its numeric representation?

This seems to be a much more significant "WTF" of the metric system than the fact that its base units don't seem to have any meaningful anchor in any substantive context.

<comment><USER72> You get several related units of measurement that each have sane conversion factors. If something goes well beyond centimeters, meters and later kilometers are much nicer to handle. Inches to feet to yards to miles doesn't scale nearly as nicely because of conversion factors of 12, 3 and (I think) 1760 involved there.

And since this property is shared by every unit you have the same conversion factors everywhere. No need to memorise hundreds of units, just a dozen and a pattern. Also when combining units (e.g. N being kg⋅m/s²) the conversion factors stay sane.

<comment><USER9> It seems like you have only a single base unit of measurement; the rigid powers-of-ten scaling factors prevent any other useful base units from being applied, e.g. there's nothing that approximates a foot in the metric system. So it seems a bit disingenuous to treat a centimeter as a distinct unit when it's really just 1 x 10^-2 meters.

The whole "conversion factors" thing seems like a superfluous gimmick. Why would you start working with one unit, then spontaneously decide to start using a different unit in the same context? But in the unusual circumstance where you _would_ need to switch units, perhaps due to a shift in the scale you're operating at, the metric system still prevents you from using a unit appropriate to the context, and limits you to only scaling a less appropriate unit up or down by a power of ten.

It really is just scientific notation re-implemented in a bizarre and arcane way. With customary units, you can still represent quantities with scientific notation, and use inches, feet, miles, etc. as your base unit as the context demands, but you've still got a variety of base units to choose from, each more optimal than the others when operating its appropriate context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I remember listening to this podcast a while back: [http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the- u-s-...](http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-on-the- metric-system/)

<comment><USER69> I remember listening to that podcast and being quite annoyed by it. One of the protagonist's who was obviously in favour of sticking with imperial units kept smugly saying the US is already metricated. Comes across disingenuous as best.

The US rarely uses metric in it's popular culture. Weather reports are in Fahrenheit, movies almost always use miles and pounds. By any measure of cultural output that they export that I've seen (and Australia is a huge consumer of US popular culture) they do not use metric.

<comment><USER74> Temperature is a weird one, and shows the difference between 'metric' and 'SI unit'. Fahrenheit is neither, and for me is far from intuitive. Celsius is a metric unit, but it's not the SI unit, which is Kelvin.

Celsius certainly makes more sense on the human scale than the other two - <USER2> general public is familiar with 'water freezes' and 'water boils' \- but it's a neat example of a metric unit not being the SI unit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> >> The Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated due to an error introduced because its software used metric measures, while its ground crew used pound-force units.

There was an incident in 1983 where Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet (12,500m) altitude [1] about half way through its flight. An investigation revealed that one of the cause was a conversion error between metric and non-metric units for the fuel loading calculation.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider)

</comment><comment><USER76> The beauty of the old system was that it mapped onto the everyday experience of farmers. I am sure hundredweights and furlongs and so forth all made lots of sense. But units have to cross cultures and times — the only intuitive units left to boast about are the foot and the yard, which are 30cm and roughly a meter. Indeed, we are probably taller now than when the yard was defined to the extent that the meter is probably closer to an intuitive yard than the yard is.

Incidentally, the official definition of an inch is 2.54cm. Now that's intuitive.

<comment><USER58> Or by Wikipedia: 25.4 millimetres

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> The things that remain often get 10 ized. we have measuring tape with feet and tenths of feet. Inches are divided into mils (1000th of an inch). So we get base 10 with familiar units of measeure.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wish the article had touched on temperature systems; I feel like Celsius is metric at its weakest. Farenheit has beautiful bands:

<0: So cold it's off the scales

0's: So cold you have trouble doing anything and just want to warm up immediately

10's: Wear a ski jacket with hat and scarf and gloves

20's: Wear a ski jacket and hat

30's: Wear a ski jacket but leave it open

40's: Wear a wool overcoat

50's: Wear a heavy jacket

60's: Wear a light jacket

70's: Leave the jacket home

80's: Wear shorts

90's: So hot you have trouble doing anything and just want to cool down immediately

100+: So hot it's off the scales

<comment><USER78> Well, to a non-American like myself the Fahrenheit scale feels weird and arbitrary (and yes, I understand the "human scale" argument, just don't buy it") while the Celsius scale makes sense.

<comment><USER58> Or is it just more familiar? We all like what we're accustomed to. Is there some reason Celsius 'makes sense'? Why does it make sense that 22 is comfortable but 40 is miserably hot? It doesn't make any more sense than 72 and 100.

<comment><USER55> The familiar part has changed for Canadians.

I grew up during the transition period I was too young to know Fahrenheit, I had just entered school when the switch was occurring.

My parents are pretty well used to Celsius now but still may occasionally use Fahrenheit such as some electronic device that allows F or C they choose F.

It's still a but messed up though since Canada borders the US. The old joke being weather reports that show the border with the US say Detroit shown as 90 and Windsor as 32 "See Marge as soon as you cross the border into Canada it goes dow to 32!"

But still you get people of all ages saying things like "300km/h wow that's nearly 200 mph" or "You weigh 70kg what's that like 150 pounds?". It's more due to history and the influence of the US on our culture, I bet more french speaking areas like Quebec, northern NB don't do that but who knows maybe they do.

<comment><USER3> I was born and raised in Florida. I now live in Sweden. Because of experience, I understand C pretty well between -15 and +10, and between +80 and +100 (Swedish sauna temperatures).

Between +20 and +50 I'm still more comfortable with 70F-120F. I also spent some time in Illinois, where I learned to understand the subzero range from -15F to 0F.

At LOX temperatures of 90K and below, I'm most comfortable in Kelvin. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> As a guy with a chem degree, I prefer Metric in the lab, and Imperial (US) in the kitchen or workshop. It isn't really that hard to shift gears/units for your task.

Even better is when you learn to cook or build without measurement, just transferring sizes directly. See James Krenov on building a cabinet.

</comment><comment><USER80> If we went metric on the interstates, exit 880 on Interstate 10 in Texas (at the Louisiana state line) would retain it's status as the highest numbered exit in North America. Only it'd be exit 1408.

(exits are generally numbered by their mile (err, kilometer..) marker in the US, not consecutively)

<comment><USER81> Not really true. In New England and most of the NE, exits are numbered consecutively, or at least started that way until ABCs got added in and others got removed.

<comment><USER80> So switching to metric would give the various DOTs in those states the opportunity to correct their numbering. They'd have fewer A,B,C exits as well, since kilometers are smaller and would increase the chance of the exit location falling nearer to a milepost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> I've wanted the USA to finish going over to the metric system for about as long as I can remember. It annoys the heck out of me that I have to have two sets of tools at hand, have to determine if fasteners are one or the other (both in their threading and drive mechanism), etc.

</comment><comment><USER83> Even worse for cities that are laid out on a mile by mile grid, like Phoenix. Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sort of related: Discussion of the Time Zone article mentioned: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200)

</comment><comment><USER84> A recent issue of Nature featured a 100 years ago in Nature clip that showed the USA thought it would be too hard to switch to the Metric system in 1914. 100 years and counting.

</comment><comment><USER85> In an age where everyone carries a computer in their pocket, the metric system's only advantage (that it makes converting units easier) is irrelevant.

<comment><USER65> Conversions being easier is nice, but the main advantage of the metric system is that it is a set of properly standardised units that the rest of the world uses...

Having a computer in your pocket is never going to change that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> We should all use the metric system and UTC time.

<comment><USER87> UTC time would make it convenient for internet sites and international travel but would suck for things like talking/writing about daily activities, schedules, times of the day. Now "a jog at 5:30am was pleasant experience because there was barely a soul on the streets" wouldn't allow you to imagine what the experience was (was it before sunrise or maybe late evening, or maybe middle of the night?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> It drives me crazy that people think base 10 systems are so great. The choice of base 10 is so deeply irritating to me. Divisions of 60 are fantastic, obviously, and we all benefit from being able to divide an hour in to 5ths, 6ths ... Meanwhile splitting a check three ways is likely to always be uneven.

Base 12 or 60 end up being more precise in every day life, and i wish whoever thought up the metric system had been smart enough to realize that.

<comment><USER89> As has been pointed out elsewhere, the 95% of the planet that uses metric systems (including dollars and cents - a decidedly metric-friendly currency) has not ended up starving due to an inability to split a food bill by the number of people at the table.

Of course, you're right that if you and 59 of your closest friends were out for dinner, it'd be easier if currencies were based upon divisions of 60, that certainly makes some sense.

Maybe whoever thought up the metric system was smart in ways that you don't yet fully appreciate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> When I read t he Tommy Lee dick joke I had to check to see how old this was. Who still makes Tommy Lee jokes?

</comment><comment><USER91> Even though I'm an ex-physicist where nearly everything was done in metric, I'm decidedly anti-metric. Most of the metric system has no empathy for the everyday life of humans and is better suited for making scientific equations easier. It is roughly the equivalent of choosing esperanto for consistency.

<comment><USER35> I grew up in a metric country. The metric system is totally fine for everyday use. We know that 1.8m is tall, that anything below 5 celsius is cold, and that 100kg is heavy.

The only downside is that some stats are only published in imperial units - fuel efficiency being the worst offender.

<comment><USER91> It really isn't the point that you can learn those things. People can also learn phone numbers and SSNs but we still use names. Wouldn't everything be much easier if we just referred to each other by our unique number? Addresses are also superfluous, just lat+lon with a unit # should be sufficient. Imperial measurements and their now American counterparts are based on human experience rather than something convenient with which to do calculations. Though the carpenters make a good case for 12in since it is so easily divided into 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6ths which are used often in construction. Even 1/5ths and 1/8ths go to only 1 decimal place. Metric is convenient for calculation and computing and not much more. Otherwise it is just a tradeoff you are making for a measurement system that wasn't designed around everyday life.

<comment><USER65> Take it from someone who grew up in a metric country - it makes _absolutely_ no difference in everyday use. You are used to imperial units, so they make more sense to you. I'm not, so they feel weird, complicated and completely arbitrary. Typically I have to mentally convert to a metric measurement to have any intuition of how big or heavy something is.

In everyday use, I don't care if something is one and 3/5ths of some part of somebody's finger - I'm used to metric so it looks about 4 centimetres...

I'm not a builder, but I've never once heard any hint from my friends in construction that using millimetres has ever been a problem for them in their work, as they are used to it and the construction industry in every other country except the US is geared towards metric...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I am really glad that a second wasn't broken further into 72 pieces.

<comment><USER49> In some fields (cinematography) it gets broken into 29.9 pieces...

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Sumerian base 60 and kumbaya y'all!

</comment><comment><USER94> > Likewise, employer-provided health insurance was a historical accident

As an European, a stance like that is near to instant execution.

<comment><USER95> What are you talking about? In some places, health care is a matter between you and the government.

The US has an odd system of subsidized employer-provided health insurance. It covers most workers, except at the low end of jobs. The government, meanwhile, provides direct coverage of the very old and the very poor.

The people who really get screwed in the US system are the ones in crappy jobs, who aren't poor enough that the government steps in directly, but don't make enough that it's worthwhile for their employers to take advantage of the subsidies of employer-provided insurance.

<comment><USER96> Or anyone who is self-employed or own their own business.</comment></comment></comment>


Azure Functions – Significant Improvements in HTTP Trigger Scaling - <AUTHOR> https://www.azurefromthetrenches.com/azure-functions-significant-improvements-in-http-trigger-scaling/ <comment><USER2> I'm in the middle of trying to move a very simple ETL-light script to Google (want to use bigquery over redshift). The idea was to use Cloud Functions.

I have ran into scale problems very fast at Google and now am having to use App Engine and add more complication which I don't have personal engineering skill/capacity.

Google support first bumped me up to 12000 max queries per 100 seconds and said that's the limit, but that's not close to enough. We have super bursty traffic (webhooks that aren't concatenated from source).

Google then increased to 100,000 per 100 seconds after they claimed 12k was maximum.

It's still not enough and I think their sampling might be funky because when I look at the invocation/traffic graphs it doesn't align with the stated maximum (still throws quota errors).

Kind of frustrating. The idea of stateless functions without worrying about engineering is a dream! I don't get why Google can't get 'google scale' here. In the past we've used Snowplow on AWS when we had engineering help but that's a huge amount of work/engineering time. The actual accept POST, store to cloud storage, insert to DB is less than 100 rows.

Response time is also pretty bad in the extreme cases. Even though I end the response before processing data I still see 95%/99% spikes when bursting on the far less bursty data source (as in only bursting to 10/second). Just today for this function I got 3764ms 99%!

<comment><USER3> I don't know your flow, but how about using a queue system to prevent the bursts of data?

We're internally using pubsub (and nats) sending billions of messages every day. We don't use the push mode as Spotify [0] but pull from the queue instead which allows us to run on our pace.

We do write into bigquery (and citus) and each components is doing it on their own pace based on what they're capable of process at the moment.

[0] [https://labs.spotify.com/2017/11/20/autoscaling-pub-sub- cons...](https://labs.spotify.com/2017/11/20/autoscaling-pub-sub-consumers/)

<comment><USER2> Pub Sub is the same quota hits (or +1 /connection). I could use pub sub but I still have to accept the incoming POST before publishing a message.

<comment><USER2> To be clearer it's same quota problem using cloud functions. Moving to something without the same quota/scale problems like Compute Engine or just DIY containers might make sense but then I'm back to a complicated system (Snowplow) that we have in AWS that's too complicated for me alone

<comment><USER3> Understood. I think there is a bit simpler setup that you could utilize, but it does require a custom deployment on GCE.

Request -> load balancer -> auto scaled pubsub writer -> pubsub -> client (write to BQ, ...)

If it doesn't have to be a post request, then you could just write into pubsub directly. Pubsub has a wide support of libraries [0] so you could do it from any language. Pubsub also scales well. We're sending in around 300k messages per sec and have very few problems with it.

[0] [https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/reference/libraries](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/docs/reference/libraries)

<comment><USER2> Yup that's pretty much where I'm going although without pub/sub ideally. it's marketing analytics so if a few inserts fail it doesn't matter. But might not be able to get the 0 -> 1000s instant working without Google's abstraction messaging in front (similar setup on AWS w. kinesis but it's too complicated for me)

I did think about doing something like transforming the POST in AWS Lambda (the emitter data is hosted there too) and transform into something I can ingest direct into pub/sub.

I can't control the emitting data. if I did it would be a much easier problem, each POST request contains very little data if there were multiple entries per single POST it would solve most of my problems, instead of sending 5k tiny JSON posts /sec lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Title should be: AWS Lambda still crush all competitors both for response time and throughput

<comment><USER5> Aren't response time and throughout directly correlated with one another. If the former drops, the latter will increase, right?

<comment><USER4> Nop because the load is supposed to be spread over thousands of servers... Not just one

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this the Azure equivalent of AWS Lambda?

What factors other than some specific affinity to Microsoft makes a company choose Azure over AWS?

<comment><USER7> Yes it is.

What do you mean by Microsoft-specific stuff? I run a bunch of stuff there. When I started using these things their PaaS offerings were much more mature than the AWS counterpart (since they focused more on IaaS).

<comment><USER8> We run all PaaS except for two very special case VMs. It is an effin' delight not having to worry about security, maintenance, updates. I just deploy my code (app services) and query my data (azure table storage, azure sql). Shit just works. Every time I need to deal with the VMs I cringe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope they figure out how to productise Python properly, because these improvements on the margin while great don't really fix 30 second import times for a single library which is the current state of Python function apps. That's a Microsoft library too (pydocumentdb).

<comment><USER10> We have some really cool stuff in the works in this area right now. An entirely new and revamped Python worker. Send me a DM on Twitter and happy to help (@jeffhollan)

<comment><USER9> Sent you a message :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> charts would be better if lines were differing in color a bit more.</comment>


Expensify's CEO on the Tactics That Doubled Its Customer Base - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/review/expensifys-ceo-on-the-tactics-that-doubled-its-customer-base-in-just-six-months/ <comment><USER2> This started off well, with lessons like paying attention to cost-of- acquisition and encouraging collaboration between product, sales, and marketing teams.

Then contradicts itself a few paragraphs later:

> Don't wait for the data. Don't pretend what little data you have is more > significant than it is...

> "...act decisively on those [opportunities] that excite you, and move on," > says Barrett.

Then straight up devolves into jibberish:

> Clear, direct language helps, but isn't a silver bullet. Authenticity and > relevance are three-dimensional variables, so timing and response workflows > are most critical.

Yes, clear and direct language, such as "authenticity and relevance are three- dimensional variables..."

Plenty of valid points in there, but it's wrapped in so much BS that I'd be ashamed to link to it.

<comment><USER3> I've known David for five or so years; he's good people. This reads like the writer had a few beers with him and just wrote down whatever David wanted to riff on.

Which is pretty much how he rolls. I like it; he'll never be buttoned up. You'll always know what he thinks.

Anyway, I'd blame the author and editor here; this is more a marketing piece for both companies than a solid bit of PR from Expensify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, he certainly is vocal :)

[http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we- dont-...](http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire- net-programmers/)

<comment><USER5> David has a good track of having balls to say what he thinks.

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/akamai-fires-engineer- who-s...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/akamai-fires-engineer-who-spoke- out-against-music-tax/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hint: He's doing it right now

</comment><comment><USER7> Too long for me to read but Expensify is an odd animal. If anything, it has been a slow and steady grower so I'm not sure I'd follow too much if you're looking for speedier growth.

</comment><comment><USER8> > _"At the time, we blindly tried all the stuff everybody says is supposed to > work: AdWords, billboards, social, content and more. And we were pretty > stressed out about it. We assumed everybody had this dialed in, and we were > just idiots. I had some very difficult conversations with our early > marketing hires, basically holding them to what I now know is an impossibly > objective standard."_

As someone who has been doing digital marketing for a long time and is intimately familiar with the pitfalls and "known unknowns" I have to agree pretty strongly with this.

Back when last-touch/click attribution was about as good as it got in digital, life was easy, but it was because we were blind to what was really happening from a data standpoint.

Now we have fancy attribution tools and OH MY GOD IS IT HORRENDOUSLY FUZZY. Some actions are relatively straightforward to measure performance of from a last-touch standpoint and those are the easy ones to deal with. For anything with a sales process requiring multiple touch points, you're in the fuzzy world of attribution.

We're getting a lot better at it, but I'd argue it is the holy grail of marketing questions to know "what value did X contribute to this goal?" which is otherwise known as "I know I'm wasting half my marketing budget, but I don't know which half." I've seen some pretty fancy econometric modelling tools, and Google has done a huge thing for the entire industry by making their core attribution and multi-channel tools available for free, but it is still maddeningly difficult to answer a question such as "what value is our display campaign driving?" or "what is a view-through conversion worth to us?"

To get lost in the minutiae is easy given the massive amount of new data available. You then end up with paralysis by analysis. Ultimately there's still some aspects of marketing you need to use your "marketer's gut" in deciding--and this is coming from someone who is a huge data nerd and loves seeing instances where data runs counter to intuition.

I'm personally dying to see what Facebook does with Atlas here as they have a very vested interest in proving the value of display given that Facebook and FBX inventory is often found to be more of a "first-touch" awareness driver vs. a last-touch "closer" and thus often gets lumped in as a poor performer for those who aren't looking at attribution, yet are measuring several channels together under a last-touch model.

That's why I often tell people that we can look at the data through a variety of lenses, but they are ultimately all directional. So picking an attribution model and consistently making decisions based on it is important. But knowing when to carve out budget to do something that may go against the model is equally important. Case in point, I've dealt with a scenario where I didn't have great cross-device tracking in place, but knew that mobile was an important touch point from an initial engagement standpoint based on some data I had. I couldn't initially prove the link, but I know it is there because I've seen all of the surrounding signs (kind of like how you tell where a black hole is by looking at the signs around where it should be). This is a "known unknown" to some extent, and measuring it precisely, while possible, is not always easy. The resulting lift from pushing mobile was validation, although perhaps not as directly measurable as I would have liked.

The best advice I can give to anyone dealing with marketing on this, particularly those with low-volume B2B situations with long sales cycles and many touch points is this:

Get comfortable with fuzzy data since if you follow old-school approaches such as "strict last click" you are going to miss out on major opportunities that more savvy and flexible competitors will eat your lunch over.

<comment><USER9> I've just joined a company that is very much feeling this fuzzy attribution problem. Care to talk more about this? Contact info is in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure if writing such a long blog post and updating blog post to comments is best use of time for a CEO of a startup.

<comment><USER7> It's valuable time spent by a CEO for a variety of reasons. Organizing thoughts. Demonstrating expertise. Getting publicity. Engaging customers and prospects. Eliciting feedback.

<comment><USER10> Fighting his idealogy about hiring on his company blog post? Sure he owns it he founded it, but does not look too good for the business IMO. maybe his clients don't care, but hey I'd rather spend more of my time talking about how my product help or how we achieve our success.

<comment><USER7> Looks like you are early in your career so I'd recommend looking at this as a learning moment. Try and forget whatever makes you think this is not valuable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>