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On December 10 2011 17:43 jalstar wrote:I had no idea. I just felt very sorry for all my engineering major friends.
Slugs, pound-moles, Rankines, and BTU's. Yeah, did that. Yeah, there was a big collective whine the first day of that class (fluid mech) of having to give our answers in slugs instead of kilograms and do calculations in lbs and the like.
Not good memories. Except for when the answer turned out being 1.3 slugs per cubic foot and I imagined it as the density of the mollusk in dirt. That was the exception.
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United Arab Emirates1141 Posts
On December 09 2011 13:35 Nothingtosay wrote:
Standard because the US is nonsensical and refuses to adapt.
Edit: Also people say half a meter, half a kilometer, etc, all the time. Sbout it lol. The US can sometimes* think everything they do is God's gift to the world. Not hating on the US, just that hubris can hurt sometimes.
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I wonder if American students have more problems with unit conversions/are worse in (basic) math/physics/... overall compared globally because of their system. Or if they actually benefit because they learn how arbitrary unit lengths can be and doesn't need to be as simple as metric (but looking at this thread, some do not even learn both systems at all).
For those that say 12-base makes more sense than 10-base, in which field would this be the case? I understand how power of twos are quite useful today, but 12-base? The only thing I can think of is the time in hours.
Still, language/customs are not always logical and/or make it easy to learn math and yet seem so natural for native speakers. For example, in the German language, the last digit is pronounced before the second last digit, so 123 is "einhundertdreiundzwanzig" which would be "onehundred-three-twenty". In the French language, I find it mind-boggling how 80 is quatre-vingt and every number above 80 under 100 is quatre-vingt + something, for example 96 is quatre-vingt-seize.
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I think the important thing we all can agree on, regardless of our views on this...
is that 1 attoparsec per microfortnight is approximately equal to 1 inch per second.
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On December 10 2011 21:18 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
I think the important thing we all can agree on, regardless of our views on this...
is that 1 attoparsec per microfortnight is approximately equal to 1 inch per second.
Yes.... agreed..
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i never understood imperial, it doesnt make sense and there are random numbers for everything while metric is easy to convert for example km to m or kg to g.
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On December 10 2011 17:43 jalstar wrote:I had no idea. I just felt very sorry for all my engineering major friends.
I find that it's a generational thing. I know an older engineer who works for my company and he loves his imperial units. He'll sit back and calculate btu/hr/ksi mumbo jumbo all day long. Meanwhile all the younger engineers do the majority of their calculations in SI and covert back to English if it's required (if not they don't). But when you're designing parts in America it's pretty ubiquitous to make the dimensions imperial, it's just what machine shops are just more comfortable with. With the advent great CNC tooling (Computer Numerically Controlled mills and lathes and the like) it's probably less important than if a machinist has to do something manually.
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On December 10 2011 19:20 jalstar wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2011 19:00 turdburgler wrote:On December 10 2011 15:38 jalstar wrote:On December 10 2011 14:58 Bobble wrote:On December 10 2011 14:29 Manit0u wrote:On December 10 2011 13:27 phant wrote:
Hey, the British made the units!
The British also started calling football soccer as well.
Americans get all the blame! You can tell me all the things you want but I'll never believe that the term 'soccer' was invented in UK. I don't think there's a more popular sport in UK (in the world (with proper Clarkson pause)) than football. A few FIFA affiliates have recently "normalized" to using "Football", including: - Australia's association football governing body changed its name in 2007 from using "soccer" to "football"
- New Zealand also changed in 2007, saying "the international game is called football."
- Samoa changed from "Samoa Football (Soccer) Federation" to "Football Federation Samoa" in 2009.
US of A, we're waiting for you... Also, Americans diverted from Imperial units quite a while ago... Well of course the soccer federations would want to be known as football, it doesn't change the fact that a lot of countries don't recognise the term. You ask any Australian what football is, and they'll respond either AFL or rugby (AFL is football though, you can't deny). Exactly, the UK is the only major native English speaking country to universally call soccer "football". The non-English speaking world calls it football because they learn British English in school, but America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all have their own forms of football (although NZ's is rugby). As for Metric vs Standard, Metric is used in every US science class I've ever taken. I'm not even sure what the speed of gravity is in imperial/standard units. I think Europeans have some weird assumption that Americans do science in imperial units for some reason. except the modern game of football existed before the modern american version of football -_-. i cant make up a new game today and call it "rugby" and say my sports name is just as valid as other rugby. you are wrong in stating that countries around the world learn british english aswell. most countries in the world actually teach american english which helps spread the term soccer. they probably think they are teaching english because they dont know the difference, but after speaking to people from around the world who have learnt english at school, i can assure you they learn american. Very wrong, American football was played at an intercollegiate level dating back to 1869, I don't think soccer's been around much longer if at all.
Let me wikipedia that for you.
Obviously, if you just search for the game of football itself, you can find "ancestors" as far back as 300BC
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On December 10 2011 19:20 jalstar wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2011 19:00 turdburgler wrote:On December 10 2011 15:38 jalstar wrote:On December 10 2011 14:58 Bobble wrote:On December 10 2011 14:29 Manit0u wrote:On December 10 2011 13:27 phant wrote:
Hey, the British made the units!
The British also started calling football soccer as well.
Americans get all the blame! You can tell me all the things you want but I'll never believe that the term 'soccer' was invented in UK. I don't think there's a more popular sport in UK (in the world (with proper Clarkson pause)) than football. A few FIFA affiliates have recently "normalized" to using "Football", including: - Australia's association football governing body changed its name in 2007 from using "soccer" to "football"
- New Zealand also changed in 2007, saying "the international game is called football."
- Samoa changed from "Samoa Football (Soccer) Federation" to "Football Federation Samoa" in 2009.
US of A, we're waiting for you... Also, Americans diverted from Imperial units quite a while ago... Well of course the soccer federations would want to be known as football, it doesn't change the fact that a lot of countries don't recognise the term. You ask any Australian what football is, and they'll respond either AFL or rugby (AFL is football though, you can't deny). Exactly, the UK is the only major native English speaking country to universally call soccer "football". The non-English speaking world calls it football because they learn British English in school, but America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all have their own forms of football (although NZ's is rugby). As for Metric vs Standard, Metric is used in every US science class I've ever taken. I'm not even sure what the speed of gravity is in imperial/standard units. I think Europeans have some weird assumption that Americans do science in imperial units for some reason. except the modern game of football existed before the modern american version of football -_-. i cant make up a new game today and call it "rugby" and say my sports name is just as valid as other rugby. you are wrong in stating that countries around the world learn british english aswell. most countries in the world actually teach american english which helps spread the term soccer. they probably think they are teaching english because they dont know the difference, but after speaking to people from around the world who have learnt english at school, i can assure you they learn american. Very wrong, American football was played at an intercollegiate level dating back to 1869, I don't think soccer's been around much longer if at all.
Try Medieval. At least this were the beginnings. Association Football (modern one) is just a bit older than American Football.
The Laws of the Game were originally codified in England by the Football Association in 1863 and have evolved since then.
And I believe that back then, American Football still resembled football more than it does now (you used your feet more to kick the ball around the stadium, pretty much what Rugby does).
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I'm an engineer that designs nuclear submarines for the US; just finished my undergrad last year. I use inches and pounds. Accelerations as a standard are in terms of number of g's so safety factors are easy to come up with when doing certain kinds of analysis.
I always prefer metric units but legacy tools, machining equipment, legacy documents and standards, and vendor interfacing requires us to stay with customary units.
Yes, would be much easier to use metric; but really if you're doing stress analysis and stuff, the math will work out the same regardless of units so the only things that matter is how much you're loading something or flowrates or pressures or whatever. X_X
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Canadian, I use Imperial because that's what our friends down south use. I've used metric my entire life from grade school all the way to graduation. Then I start working and I'm always working in inches. I dunno... sometimes using decimals and sometimes using 1/16ths is really weird. I'd design a part to be 1.2", then the part comes in and I inspect it and I'm like "well it's somewhere between 1 3/16" and 1 1/4" so it's fine." It's so confusing
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Do you use standard or Imperial system?
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I wonder if American students have more problems with unit conversions/are worse in (basic) math/physics/... overall compared globally because of their system. Or if they actually benefit because they learn how arbitrary unit lengths can be and doesn't need to be as simple as metric (but looking at this thread, some do not even learn both systems at all).
There are more meaningful questions with units in the US. Asking someone to convert joules per second to watts in a metric country would be odd. But asking "How many matchsticks stacked end-to-end would fit between here and Yorkshire" is an equally valid unit question in either system.
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Troll thread with obvious conclusion?
Takes TL 40 pages to sort it out.
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~Standard, obviously. What doesn't make sense about 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and 1760 yards in a mile?~
~Totally normal! 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 100 centimeters in a meter, and 1000 meters in a kilometer is so confusing!~
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Metric of course, it just makes much more sense. Easy to memorize and way less confusing. Once our professor gave us some structure analysis problems that he's taken out of an American books. Man, the units in their confused the hell out of our class O_O.
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Nothing is as natural as 1760 yards in a mile. It´s just 16 times 110.
No seriously, I am in continental europe, and I´ve never used pounds or ounces outside of cooking.
I am just befuddled that the topic states "Standard" or metric. Whereas "standard" is only standard in the US.
Even other english speaking countries changed to metric.
Consider calling it imperial from now on, because that´s how old your system is.
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On December 11 2011 00:29 Holy Check wrote:
Troll thread with obvious conclusion?
Takes TL 40 pages to sort it out.
three and a quarter dozen pages to be precise ;-)
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If 1 mile was changed from ~1608m to 1500m maybe the transition would be easier from imperial>metric. Then Americans and Brits could use miles with the knowledge that 2 miles = 3 kilometres. It would also make it easier for metric users to understand how far a road is in America. Just my 2 cents and so forth...
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EPT
