Metric system of measurements

jtg452 wrote:

Joat42 wrote:And the use of imperial is why the Challenger is still around..

Actually, that would be NASA's hubris. Relying on gaskets to seal fuel cells and then launching at a temperature well below the safety limit of those gaskets is what led to the explosion. Who knew that gaskets shrank in cold temperatures? (Other than anyone with any practical experience with gaskets, of course.)

Besides, Challenger was built after the metric boondoogle- and, as you and others have pointed out, the metric system was adopted by the science and engineering communities long ago.

I wonder if the Russians bothered to convert to metric when they put their clone of the B-29 (the TU-4) into production.

According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4, the Soviet Union converted all skin thicknesses to metric when they created the production drawings for the TU-4.

jtg452 wrote:
Odd that you mention Roman numerals since that was the first change Merlin made on Safehold, remember?

You still haven't come up with why the metric system is as superior as you seem to believe. I haven't claimed that it is inferior to Imperial- just different- so changing for changing's sake is more about a need for conformity than actual improvement or necessity.

You do bring up a point that seems to go past so many metric advocates. For the majority of the population does the system used matter that much as long as it is consistent?

I will rather bluntly point out that at the critical time for the US to adopt the Metric system it was not seen as better that the customary system. Things were different in Europe because there were so many different systems in use, that once any merchant tried to bring products to the wider market the variance became a major headache. The US had spent a lot of effort in the colonial period making sure that 12 inches in Philly was a foot in both Boston MA and Williamsburg VA.

As mail order systems and standardized manufacturing became common after 1830, the US and to an extent Canada used the US customary system for units of measure, the Brits and most of their colonies used the UK Imperial system, while Europe and the French colonies used the Metric System.

How was the metric system objectively better for the merchant and their customers in the US in the period 1800 to 1820?

Well for the merchant it would be a question of which system is more effective and least prone to error. An example could be converting 16435 meters to km vs converting 16435 yards to miles.

It goes 1000 meter om a km. Therefore

16,435 / 1000 -> 16.435 km

It goes 1760 yards on a mile. Therefore

16,435/ 1760 -> 9.338 miles according to my calculator


If the merchant has a good understanding of the metric system he can do most conversion between meters and km in the head without much risk of error. That extends to all measures in the metric system.

For everyday use for most people there's not really much to choose from between US customary and metric; the only real advantage metric has is that it is decimal rather than fractional and when almost everyone has a calculator in their pocket, it's faster to use decimals than fractions.

However, from a scientific and engineering perspective, metric has the advantage of units that (mostly) convert easily, have built with scaling without changing units (i.e. standardized prefixes that use the same root unit as in meters, grams, and liters), and the units for each thing are unique (US customary has pounds-force and pounds-mass which are different by a factor of 32.174). These differences all combine to create a system that is much more effective for science and engineering. Most of those advantages are primarily due to the fact the metric was a deliberately developed system of measurements rather than a system the grew out of thousands of years of what was needed by agrarian societies.

Back to the original question of the topic, Safehold doesn't have to switch to metric. They don't even have to get rid of the US customary system. They just need to go about expanding it (from their perspective) in a deliberate fashion that avoids the difficulties the the real world system does. Of course, since they're trying to leverage the knowledge of the Federation, it would probably make more sense to adopt to the metric system.

jtg452 wrote:No, it's called sarcasm.

One of the arguments presented was that the metric system is superior because it's used in engineering and science.

I sarcastically pointed out that one of the (if not the single) greatest scientific and engineering feats of modern times- putting man on the moon- was done using equipment made using Imperial measurements and that sort of flies in the face of their assertion.

Come to think of it, so would Chuck Yeager's breaking the sound barrier in level flight.

And Wilbur and Orville's flights at Kittyhawk.

The Soviets didn't make it to the moon for a plethora of reasons completely unrelated to something as silly as what unit of measure they used when building their equipment.

Again-

I don't buy into the claim that Imperial is inadequate. I also think that the claims of metric's superiority are vastly overstated.

dragon723 wrote:Well for the merchant it would be a question of which system is more effective and least prone to error. An example could be converting 16435 meters to km vs converting 16435 yards to miles.

It goes 1000 meter om a km. Therefore

16,435 / 1000 -> 16.435 km

It goes 1760 yards on a mile. Therefore

16,435/ 1760 -> 9.338 miles according to my calculator


If the merchant has a good understanding of the metric system he can do most conversion between meters and km in the head without much risk of error. That extends to all measures in the metric system.

Bad comparison.

Meters and yards aren't the same distances- a meter is 3 inches and change longer. You are just moving numbers rather than dealing with the actual distance in question and then pointing and saying, "Aha!" when things don't come out right.

I ran the conversion from metric to Imperial-meters to yards to miles and then kilometers to miles- twice (once with an online conversion program and once with a calculator) and came up with the same answers every time.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4, the Soviet Union converted all skin thicknesses to metric when they created the production drawings for the TU-4.

Before the Russians entered the war with Japan in 1945, any B-29 that landed on Russian soil was interred. Stalin ordered a couple to be kept. One was used for testing while the other was disassembled so his engineers could see how it worked.

He later ordered an exact replica of one of the planes be made. Since it was Stalin, the engineers and the build crew copied it exactly- using Imperial measurements and right down to a patch on the outer skin from previous battle damage.

dragon723 wrote:Well for the merchant it would be a question of which system is more effective and least prone to error.

Medieval cloth merchants could keep track of different lengths of the ell and yard as defined in different cloth-producing areas, and do the math with Roman numerals to boot. The fact that the cloth faires continued for decades if not longer should indicate that those merchants weren't going broke from selling 5 ells of English fabric for the same price as 5 ells of Flemish fabric.

Donnachaidh wrote:Back to the original question of the topic, Safehold doesn't have to switch to metric. They don't even have to get rid of the US customary system. They just need to go about expanding it (from their perspective) in a deliberate fashion that avoids the difficulties the the real world system does. Of course, since they're trying to leverage the knowledge of the Federation, it would probably make more sense to adopt to the metric system.

Once Safehold can go full Federation, we'll probably see a switch to metric simply because it would be faster than asking Owl to convert all his stored texts. But until that day, Merlin and the Inner Circle have already done everything necessary by setting up uniform measurements and spreading that idea as widely as possible. They don't need metric when they've got everyone using the same size inch for the first time in Safehold's history -- and even the most reactionary Inquistor can't complain about it, because the Writ requires that measurements be "fair" and what's more fair than everyone on the same yardstick?

jtg452 wrote:

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4, the Soviet Union converted all skin thicknesses to metric when they created the production drawings for the TU-4.

Before the Russians entered the war with Japan in 1945, any B-29 that landed on Russian soil was interred. Stalin ordered a couple to be kept. One was used for testing while the other was disassembled so his engineers could see how it worked.

He later ordered an exact replica of one of the planes be made. Since it was Stalin, the engineers and the build crew copied it exactly- using Imperial measurements and right down to a patch on the outer skin from previous battle damage.

But that B-29 copy wasn't a Tu-4. There were hundreds of those built; all built using metric tooling.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:
But that B-29 copy wasn't a Tu-4. There were hundreds of those built; all built using metric tooling.

You're right.

The TU-4 was a copy of the B-29 based on the detailed study of the interred planes in the Soviet Far East prior to the USSR declaring war on Japan.

Castenea wrote:

jtg452 wrote:
Odd that you mention Roman numerals since that was the first change Merlin made on Safehold, remember?

You still haven't come up with why the metric system is as superior as you seem to believe. I haven't claimed that it is inferior to Imperial- just different- so changing for changing's sake is more about a need for conformity than actual improvement or necessity.

You do bring up a point that seems to go past so many metric advocates. For the majority of the population does the system used matter that much as long as it is consistent?

I will rather bluntly point out that at the critical time for the US to adopt the Metric system it was not seen as better that the customary system. Things were different in Europe because there were so many different systems in use, that once any merchant tried to bring products to the wider market the variance became a major headache. The US had spent a lot of effort in the colonial period making sure that 12 inches in Philly was a foot in both Boston MA and Williamsburg VA.

As mail order systems and standardized manufacturing became common after 1830, the US and to an extent Canada used the US customary system for units of measure, the Brits and most of their colonies used the UK Imperial system, while Europe and the French colonies used the Metric System.

How was the metric system objectively better for the merchant and their customers in the US in the period 1800 to 1820?

In Canada we used actual Imperial Units, not the American Units.