Is it necessary to switch all road signs in the US and UK from imperial to metric?

[argatoga]

You already are using some SI units to measure time. Ever heard of this little bugger called the second?

Ever wonder why there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day? SI didn't come up with the base three time system the Sumerians did.

I knew my Ancient Mediterranean History major would serve me one day.

 

[narf]

Ever wonder why there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day? SI didn't come up with the base three time system the Sumerians did.

That's why I said "some SI units", not "only SI units". There's also the handy millisecond you might love from sports broadcasts, or the tenth of a second, or the hundredth, ...
Many computers even run on metric time.

 

[mooglebunny]

Here in California, there was -some- effort to use both back in the late 1990s I believe. For a while a lot of I-5 signs and on a few other highways were in Metric and Imperial. It was very odd. A lot of those signs are gone after the state required exit numbers on all of the signs in the early-to-mid-2000s (I still see one or two from time to time while traveling around).

 

[narf]

That article boils down to 'the general public is too stupid to do math, so we should change how things are written instead of encouraging them to acquire the required knowledge.'

One of the most prominent thing I hear when talking about imperial vs metric is "imperial is more intuitive". That brings me neatly to the essence of that article: ?Miles per gallon is misleading and can play tricks on our intuitions.?


In case you haven't noticed, those new EPA fuel economy labels already do feature a gallon per 100 mile figure.

 

[GerFix]

If you say "too difficult", then I would say - people take math classes in the UK and the US and learn how to multiply, maybe you should do the same?

Converting imperial to metric and vice versa isn't as simple (or benign) as you imply. There has been at least one airline crash (Gimli in Canada) as the result of the pounds to kilograms conversion being botched, when the craft was taking on fuel. Also, NASA botched conversions when programming the navigation system on the Mars Climate Orbiter causing it to crash in 1999.

In medicine, where the US uses both imperial and metric units, medication errors are not infrequent as the result of incorrect unit conversions, particularly in paediatrics (where, doses are given on body weight). I'd hate to work there. The units are all screwed up. Some are metric and SI, other are metric and god-knows-what. It is the only place in the world where blood glucose is measured in mg/dl ... so when you have a diabetic patient you need to fumble for a conversion factor to figure out what the glucose is in mmol/l before you can figure out what contribution it is making to their serum osmolality (mosmol/l).

Changing road signs probably isn't a matter of life and death though.

 

[Viper007Bond]

The one and only real advantage that metric has over the imperial system is that it's base 10 which makes it easy to use with math and science (conversion). That's exactly why in every single school in the US, metric is used for all science classes.

Everywhere else, it absolutely does not matter. It's completely arbitrary.

 

[Emarline]

The main problem with switching systems is that Americans think in Imperial. You tell someone it's 20 C outside, it means absolutely nothing to them. But tell them it's 68 F, and they might put a jacket on. A change-over would have to be very slow and gradual if it were to work at all, like I think how the UK is right now, with a mix of the two systems.

Like Viper said, there's very little real advantage in switching over.

To respond to an earlier question, below the inch we use fractions of inches or switch over into cm or mm. Metric makes more sense for precision sciences, but the big numbers with margin for error get unwieldy.

 

[narf]

But tell them it's 68 F, and they might put a jacket on.

Who needs a jacket at 68f? :lol:

To respond to an earlier question, below the inch we use fractions of inches or switch over into cm or mm. Metric makes more sense for precision sciences, but the big numbers with margin for error get unwieldy.

Sooo... 34mpg would be 1.75686274 (inch/128)?? Feels cumbersome :lol:

 

[Emarline]

Who needs a jacket at 68f? :lol:

In the summer, when it gets down to 68 and you're used to it being at 90 or so, yeah, you want a light jacket.

Sooo... 34mpg would be 1.75686274 (inch/128)?? Feels cumbersome :lol:

I mean that we have larger units, like furlongs and fathoms and leagues (lol medieval measurements -- how no one uses you anymore).

 

[narf]

I mean that we have larger units, like furlongs and fathoms and leagues (lol medieval measurements -- how no one uses you anymore).

We have larger units as well, such as the megametre (Mm, 621 miles). I was just wondering how you would express a small area in imperial units, such as my car's fuel consumption of 0.000107230392??.

 

[Viper007Bond]

We have larger units as well, such as the megametre (Mm, 621 miles). I was just wondering how you would express a small area in imperial units, such as my car's fuel consumption of 0.000107230392??.

Consumption is miles per gallon, or perhaps gallons per 10000 miles.

 

[Labcoatguy]

We have larger units as well, such as the megametre (Mm, 621 miles). I was just wondering how you would express a small area in imperial units, such as my car's fuel consumption of 0.000107230392??.

Imperial units don't really go small enough to do things like that, and seeing as how the relationship between, say, volume and length isn't as clear-cut, there's rarely a need to do so.

 

[narf]

Consumption is miles per gallon

Yeah, but a gallon is nothing but 9.08168583?10^-13 miles?, so 1mi/gal actually is nothing but 1.10111715?10^12 / mi?. Thinking in miles^-2 is tough though, hence gallon per mile should feel better - 1 gallon per 10000 miles is nothing but 9.08168583?10^-17 miles?. That's where a small unit of area would come in.
https://pic.armedcats.net/n/na/narf/2011/06/02/20110128203738_Trollface.png

seeing as how the relationship between, say, volume and length isn't as clear-cut

That's area right there. Take an area and a length, get volume. Take volume and remove a length, get area. Clear-cut?

 

[Labcoatguy]

That's area right there. Take an area and a length, get volume. Take volume and remove a length, get area. Clear-cut?

You know what I mean, as in the relationship between a foot and a gallon or an inch and a fluid ounce.

 

[narf]

You know what I mean, as in the relationship between a foot and a gallon or an inch and a fluid ounce.

Use SI units then

 

[Labcoatguy]

I do, professionally. Granted, I did elementary school in Canada and trained in science and engineering so I'm pretty bilingual units-wise.

 

[TC]

Personally, I hate the gallons per 100 miles measurement, since I don't drive hundreds of miles at a time. I like putting 10 gallons in my tank and having a good idea how far it will get me. The whole "if you replace this car with this other car or this SUV with this crossover, which improves your fuel consumptions more" stuff seems rather pointless and not very useful. It's like one of those trick questions in school that has no practical use in the real world.

 

[narf]

Personally, I hate the gallons per 100 miles measurement, since I don't drive hundreds of miles at a time. I like putting 10 gallons in my tank and having a good idea how far it will get me. The whole "if you replace this car with this other car or this SUV with this crossover, which improves your fuel consumptions more" stuff seems rather pointless and not very useful. It's like one of those trick questions in school that has no practical use in the real world.

Converting X gallons per 100 miles to gallons per 10 miles or gallons per mile is fairly straightforward, just move the decimal point once if you go tens of miles at a time or twice if you go just a couple of miles at a time.

The second bit apparently depends on your mindset. You say "I have X gallons fuel, what can I do with it?". I'd say "I want to do X, how much fuel do I need?".

The third bit is just an example to show why distance per volume fuel consumption figures are flawed. For instance, saying "X gets 5mpg more than Y" has no meaning. 6mpg vs 1mpg would be huge, 105mpg vs 100mpg would be
See the 74mpg-thread for more - in short, you can't even compute an average mpg over several cars because one extremely frugal car takes too much weight in this reciprocal scale.

 

[prizrak]

Personally, I hate the gallons per 100 miles measurement, since I don't drive hundreds of miles at a time. I like putting 10 gallons in my tank and having a good idea how far it will get me. The whole "if you replace this car with this other car or this SUV with this crossover, which improves your fuel consumptions more" stuff seems rather pointless and not very useful. It's like one of those trick questions in school that has no practical use in the real world.

I just have a distance to empty display

 

[TC]

Converting X gallons per 100 miles to gallons per 10 miles or gallons per mile is fairly straightforward, just move the decimal point once if you go tens of miles at a time or twice if you go just a couple of miles at a time.

The second bit apparently depends on your mindset. You say "I have X gallons fuel, what can I do with it?". I'd say "I want to do X, how much fuel do I need?".

The third bit is just an example to show why distance per volume fuel consumption figures are flawed. For instance, saying "X gets 5mpg more than Y" has no meaning. 6mpg vs 1mpg would be huge, 105mpg vs 100mpg would be
See the 74mpg-thread for more - in short, you can't even compute an average mpg over several cars because one extremely frugal car takes too much weight in this reciprocal scale.

It must come down to mindset, because I have no problem with mpg. I see what you're saying when it comes to comparison figures, but that hardly effects my every day life.