US switching to metric system?

[redpoint5]

I didn't know there were 5280 feet in a mile until I was 18 years old. Never having needed to know that fact, I never bothered to learn or memorize it.

The beauty of the metric system is that I don't have to know how many meters are in a kilometer, or any other unit. The only memorization required is to know the prefix that is universally applied to all measurements.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I didn't know there were 5280 feet in a mile until I was 18 years old. Never having needed to know that fact, I never bothered to learn or memorize it.

And why would you need to know it? What's useful (at least to anyone who walks a bit) is knowing that a mile is pretty close to 1000 paces for an average-sized person.

[freebeard]

When I was in high school it was important to being able to lay out a 1/4 mile on rural roads. How many fence posts was that?

Your average sized person, prior to age 18, has a stride proportional to their age, so the math is harder.

[user removed]

If the road has stripes they are a specific distance apart.

I think it's about 43.5 feet, 11meters?

13 stripes per .10 mile in the US, so .25 mile would be about 33-34 stripes.

Ah, a new means of measurement, road stripes. Use them to calibrate your speedometer, with a stop watch, but then, time is not metric either, guess we need to change the clocks, or speed up or slow down the earth.

regards
mech

[RedDevil]

There is one unit of length that is not arbitrary.
And it is already in use for measurements across the universe.
It is called the light year.

Somewhat more practical, and arguably more ISO standard like, is the light second.
At 299 792.458 kilometers it has some resonance in everyday life, like your car may cover that distance in its lifetime.
A light microsecond would be a tad shy of 300 meters and a light nanosecond would be
30 cm long, just under a foot, but still bigger than my feet actually.

We can have a light footed approach to this all

[Fat Charlie]

Originally Posted by Old Mechanic

... but then, time is not metric either, guess we need to change the clocks, or speed up or slow down the earth.

What do you want to bet a reasonable metric measurement of time could eliminate leap years?

[user removed]

I remember reading about the Romans adding days to the calendar to give people another holiday, finally got it so messed up the seasons were off.

Julian?

LOL

regards
mech

[freebeard]

Now the boys all thought that I'd lost my sense
Those telephone poles were like a picket fence
They said "Slow down, I see spots!"
The lines on the road just looked like dots

Charlie Ryan -- Hot Rod Lincoln

Originally Posted by RedDevil

There is one unit of length that is not arbitrary.
And it is already in use for measurements across the universe.
It is called the light year.

Which is based on the orbit of one planet around one star. I think the word is parochial. Per Buckminster Fuller, it's all frequency and angle, plus some tetrahedrons (for sub-dividing volume) and precession (to establish chirality and the right-hand rule).

Edit: Bucky talked about parsing out [the problem], everything bigger than [the problem], and everything smaller than [the problem]. That scope determines the scale units. The breadth of the range determines the granularity of the measurements.

[user removed]

I remember the stripes seeming to merge into a single line at 145mph (divide by .621 to get KM ) on the 7 mile bridge in the Fla Keys (old one, section destroyed in the movie "True Lies"), in a 83 MB 450 SEL, at night. Cops could not turn around until they went 3 miles past us.



regards
mech

[P-hack]

Originally Posted by Fat Charlie

What do you want to bet a reasonable metric measurement of time could eliminate leap years?

Ok, I'll take that bet. Nothing about the metric system will change the fact that a year isn't an integer multiple of a day.