Metric Signage

[US 41]

If I'm not mistaken, the entirety of I-19 (from Tucson to Nogales, Arizona) is metric.

That is true.

Do the Mexicans have miles on the connecting route?  If not then why should we put up kilometers?

No, Mexico doesn't. Arizona has thought about changing the kms to miles along I-19. I'm not sure if that will ever happen though.

[tidecat]

Kentucky has a few signs giving both miles and kilometers on I-265 near Westport Road.

Alabama actually had kilometer and mile markers on I-65 during the 1990s in preparation for the switch that of course never came.

[Scott5114]

If I'm not mistaken, the entirety of I-19 (from Tucson to Nogales, Arizona) is metric.

That is true.

Do the Mexicans have miles on the connecting route?  If not then why should we put up kilometers?

Has nothing to do with the Mexicans–the route was built during the 1970s, when metrication in the US appeared inevitable. Since then, there's been some resistance from the locals against changing it to customary units.

[WichitaRoads]

I think this thread needs to be moved... all in favor?

Eh, screw democracy... admin, let's move it.

ICTRds

[english si]

I think the US never took to the metric system in part because of they way they tried teaching it to us in school decades ago.  Instead of giving us metric rulers and such, they gave us math problems.  How many centimeters is 23 inches?  That's a multiplication problem, not a measurement problem.

Ah, but the conformity zealots won't even let you do that (I was lucky as I had that on the curriculum when I went through school. My brother, 4 years later, went through school without syllabuses acknowledging the existence of non-metric units). As such, I'm fluent in both, and he only has a vague idea when people use non-metric units (outside of pint, mile, foot, etc that are in widespread everyday usage)...

It did help that I was taught how to add, subtract and multiply in non-base-10 (using £sd in the main, despite ceasing to exist 15 years before my birth).

And NASA crashed a probe into Mars because someone used the wrong units in a calculation.

No. NASA crashed a probe as someone didn't put units down in their calculation, and the metric borg couldn't conceive of someone not using metric, so assumed they were metric - if the first guy had stated his units (as I had to do to not lose marks in every single maths and science exam), and if the second guy queried rather than assumed, and if there was some quality control, then it would have been fine.

It was not the use of wrong units, but the assumption that there are 'wrong units' (or, rather, only one 'right units'), that exacerbated the poor communication and led to an expensive failure.

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re: chains - yes. Britain's railways are done in miles and chains. A chain is 20m for the metricophiles (and it was originally where the 22 was in Rugby Union, but they moved it to 22m, rather than 22yds. It's also the distance between stumps in cricket, half the width of the penalty area in association football, and the distance between the goal and the top of the D in soccer too. Of course, few, if any of you would get those sports references).

Surveying, esp in the gridded parts of the North American West, were done with chains, just as British railway surveys were.

All you need is something that's a 1/10th of a link, to roughly replace the inch/centimetre order of magnitude.

[agentsteel53]

It did help that I was taught how to add, subtract and multiply in non-base-10 (using £sd in the main, despite ceasing to exist 15 years before my birth).

shudder.  that's not only not non-base-10 but it has a different 'base' in every position. 

quick, what's £1.19s.11¾d times 7 units, plus 8% sales tax?

A chain is 20m for the metricophiles (and it was originally where the 22 was in Rugby Union, but they moved it to 22m, rather than 22yds.

there is an implication that 20 meters is the same as 22 yards.  that's not quite right - and while in rugby it is not an essential difference, I bet it would be when measuring land!

[1995hoo]

Ah, but the conformity zealots won't even let you do that (I was lucky as I had that on the curriculum when I went through school. My brother, 4 years later, went through school without syllabuses acknowledging the existence of non-metric units). As such, I'm fluent in both, and he only has a vague idea when people use non-metric units (outside of pint, mile, foot, etc that are in widespread everyday usage)...

It did help that I was taught how to add, subtract and multiply in non-base-10 (using £sd in the main, despite ceasing to exist 15 years before my birth).
....

Heh. I had a teacher in high school who required us to keep a grade sheet (which was not all that unusual). She was a bit of an obnoxious bitch, so I decided to be a bit of a smartarse by maintaining my grade sheet in binary numbers. She was Not Amused, even though it was completely accurate. 

During my first few years of elementary school in the late 1970s in Fairfax County, Virginia, we mostly learned metric units but also got some of the American ones. The focus was definitely more on the metric units. To this day I couldn't tell you most of the conversions between American units and I have to stop to think about most of the ones I do remember. For many years I thought there were 12 ounces in a pound, probably because soda came in 12-ounce cans (since I didn't realize there was a difference between an ounce and a fluid ounce....for some reason I thought "12 FL OZ" meant "12 full ounces" and I wondered why they felt the need to specify "full").

I rather prefer using grams in the kitchen because of the smaller unit. It allows for more precision when weighing things on the kitchen scale (which can be set to either grams or ounces by holding down a button).

[kkt]

If I'm not mistaken, the entirety of I-19 (from Tucson to Nogales, Arizona) is metric.

That is true.

Do the Mexicans have miles on the connecting route?  If not then why should we put up kilometers?

Because the world has decided what system of measurement to use, and it ain't U.S. miles.

[english si]

shudder.  that's not only not non-base-10 but it has a different 'base' in every position.

That was why we did that - it was a maths exercise. Though it was also an extra-curricular, in the classroom, way of teaching imperial units. That we did £sd was that it made the most difficult calculations (and were the only real mixed unit calculations that you commonly had to do in 1950s Britain) and encouraged half the class that non-metric maths wasn't so hard!

quick, what's £1.19s.11¾d times 7 units

Well that's £14, minus 7 farthings, so (avoiding the base issues entirely) that's £13 19'10¼.

, plus 8% sales tax?

Crazy Americans not including tax in the price! And 8% is a disgusting metric invasion, and I highly doubt that, without some form of calculator aid, or a round number, you could do it with dollars and cents in your head. However if it was 8.333333%, that's a handy 1/12.

A twelfth of £12 is £1, a twelfth of 36 shillings is 4', and a twelfth of 4 shillings is 4d, Except we get some change from the 7 farthings, where a twelfth is too small to deal with unless you are in Colonial Sri Lanka (maybe other places had half-farthings)... So it works out as £16 4'2¼ thanks to the sale tax done in the silly 'merkin way.

Of course, we converted about 20-25 years into the period where you needed to deal with all the units, rather than either ignore the pennies as irrelevant, or not deal with pounds. 20-25 years later, we could have ditched pennies entirely - perhaps having a quarter shilling as well as a half shilling, and we'd ditch both by now, rather than hanging on to worthless shrapnel as the penny purely as it forms 1 base unit (or 2 base units in the case of our two pence piece).

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In the kitchen, the cup or the oz is just so much better. Cake recipes as 1-1-2-2 or whatever are much easier to remember than 25-25-50-2. And the cup is nice and simple to use, rather than the scales (sadly I only have a rice cup, which isn't in cups, but it works for getting the proportions for the rice cooker right in an easy way).

[kkt]

I'm sort of two minds on this subject: as a scientist I use metric units for all my measurements, so clearly that leads me to favor the metric system.

However, the original purpose of the metric system was to get rid of the ambiguity that traditional units had. When Isaac Newton was writing his works, he couldn't simply describe a measurement as, say, "10 feet". He had to specify which foot he was using to measure, because every city had their own definition. Most of that ambiguity has been removed since then, though there is still some ambiguity in volume measurements (e.g. the British pint vs. the American pint). At this point, though, if someone specifies a measurement in feet, it is unambiguous what they mean, which means the foot is not a problematic unit to use the way it was back in Newton's time. This is why I don't think the U.S. will ever give up the English system of units: with the ambiguity (mostly) having been removed, there's no longer a strong motivation to switch.

Actually there's still possible ambiguity.  In 1959, inches, feet, and miles were standardized based on 1 inch=25.4 mm.  But land was surveyed on old inches, feet, and miles, which are slightly different.

Also it would be possible to confuse U.S. land miles with nautical miles.

[Brandon]

Surveying, esp in the gridded parts of the North American West, were done with chains, just as British railway surveys were.

All you need is something that's a 1/10th of a link, to roughly replace the inch/centimetre order of magnitude.

Actually, most of North America is surveyed using chains, from Ohio westward.  The only places in the US not surveyed that way are the Original 13, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Hawai'i, and a part of Ohio.

As for the second, a "centi-link"?  A link is 7.92 inches, or 33/50 of a foot.  This, not feet, not meters, should have become the basis for land measurement, IMHO.

[english si]

Actually, most of North America is surveyed using chains, from Ohio westward.

By 'West' I was including the Mid-West and kind of thought Indiana, Michigan, and west of the Mississippi as a rough guess (which was pretty correct - just Alabama and Mississippi and part of Ohio that I missed out).

Not that "especially in the gridded parts of North American West" excludes elsewhere...

As for the second, a "centi-link"?

A deci-link, not a centi-link... those difficult prefixes are what makes metric soooo easy (not).

Note that in the metric world, where the US (and informally in the Anglosphere) would use Acres, they use Hectares. I was well into my twenties before I found out that it is 10000m^2, or 0.01km^2. 'hecto-' is 100, not that it's used much outside this, and a hectare is defined by a 100mx100m. So much for logical metric with easy-to-remember prefixes! The reason it is 100x100 (or roughly 2.5 acres) is as the km^2 is too big, and the m^2 is too small (see also why centi- units are common, rather than using milli- and keeping with the pattern of 10^3 gaps that happens outside 10^-3 to 10^4 range).

[algorerhythms]

And NASA crashed a probe into Mars because someone used the wrong units in a calculation.

No. NASA crashed a probe as someone didn't put units down in their calculation, and the metric borg couldn't conceive of someone not using metric, so assumed they were metric - if the first guy had stated his units (as I had to do to not lose marks in every single maths and science exam), and if the second guy queried rather than assumed, and if there was some quality control, then it would have been fine.

It was not the use of wrong units, but the assumption that there are 'wrong units' (or, rather, only one 'right units'), that exacerbated the poor communication and led to an expensive failure.

That's not actually accurate. NASA specified the units required for the software in the documentation, but the development team didn't follow the documentation. If you're a software developer and the documentation says a certain unit is required, you use that unit, regardless of whether it's newton-seconds, pound-seconds, or Jupiter-mass-earth-gravity-fortnights. Granted, this isn't necessarily an issue with the systems of units rather than with carelessness on the part of the development team: if they're careless enough to miss what the output units are expected by the program interpreting the output, then they're careless enough to miss some other important detail.

[Avalanchez71]

Surveying, esp in the gridded parts of the North American West, were done with chains, just as British railway surveys were.

All you need is something that's a 1/10th of a link, to roughly replace the inch/centimetre order of magnitude.

Actually, most of North America is surveyed using chains, from Ohio westward.  The only places in the US not surveyed that way are the Original 13, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Hawai'i, and a part of Ohio.

As for the second, a "centi-link"?  A link is 7.92 inches, or 33/50 of a foot.  This, not feet, not meters, should have become the basis for land measurement, IMHO.

That is correct about Tennessee.  We use metes and bounds.

[agentsteel53]

Crazy Americans not including tax in the price!

yeah, that is indeed pretty crazy.  I can, however, as a seller of goods and a collector of sales tax, can see that psychologically, "$199 plus tax" sounds a lot more amenable than "$214.92".  (or, really, I'd round that to 215 if I were making that the sale price.)

And 8% is a disgusting metric invasion, and I highly doubt that, without some form of calculator aid, or a round number, you could do it with dollars and cents in your head. However if it was 8.333333%, that's a handy 1/12.

I can do 8% in my head easier than 1/12, for just about any amount that isn't an obvious multiple of 12.  might just be how my brain works.

[oscar]

Crazy Americans not including tax in the price!

yeah, that is indeed pretty crazy.  I can, however, as a seller of goods and a collector of sales tax, can see that psychologically, "$199 plus tax" sounds a lot more amenable than "$214.92".  (or, really, I'd round that to 215 if I were making that the sale price.)

The other psychological effect is to make explicit how much tax you're paying, rather than bury that in the final price, and how much you might save by making your purchase in a lower-tax jurisdiction.  That's not uniform practice, such as for motor fuel where the tax is folded into the final price (but sometimes there will be a sticker or other information about how much of it is tax, to deflect or minimize blame for gas prices U.S. residents think are too high). 

[Scott5114]

Crazy Americans not including tax in the price!

yeah, that is indeed pretty crazy.  I can, however, as a seller of goods and a collector of sales tax, can see that psychologically, "$199 plus tax" sounds a lot more amenable than "$214.92".  (or, really, I'd round that to 215 if I were making that the sale price.)

The other psychological effect is to make explicit how much tax you're paying, rather than bury that in the final price, and how much you might save by making your purchase in a lower-tax jurisdiction.  That's not uniform practice, such as for motor fuel where the tax is folded into the final price (but sometimes there will be a sticker or other information about how much of it is tax, to deflect or minimize blame for gas prices U.S. residents think are too high). 

Splitting the tax out on its own also makes it easier on sellers that operate in multiple jurisdictions. I live in Norman (Cleveland County) and used to work across the river in Goldsby (McClain County). Norman and Goldsby both have the same tax rate, but McClain County's tax rate is 0.25 percentage points higher. So if I made a sale to a friend visiting my home I would charge them 8.25% but if I did it at work I would have to charge 8.5%.

It is a lot easier to say "the price is $22.99 plus tax" rather than "it's $24.89 if you come to my house, or $24.94 if I sell it to you at work".