The other day, for no real reason, I was thinking about metric measurements and how often we use them. I'm not thinking of scientific contexts, just everyday uses that most people in the United States accept without thinking much about it. For example:
- Grams: turntable counterweight, illicit drugs
- Kilograms: illicit drugs (kilos)
- Kilometers: army distance (klicks), fun runs (5K, 10K)
- Meters: sports (100 meter dash, etc.)
- Centimeters: motorcycle engines (cc)
- Millimeters: cigarette length, metric tools, photography (lenses, film size), gun calibers
- Liters: soft drinks, automobile engines
- Milligrams: prescription drugs, nutrients
Any others come to mind? Remember, nothing from the scientific community.
International sports and the Olympics is pretty standardized in metric now, which is why we mostly use metric for track and swimming distances - 1500 meters instead of the mile, for example.
One of the reasons English measurements persist in the U.S., I think, is because the whole construction industry is very reluctant to let go of the feet, yards, and inches that they are used to.
The international convention that I would most like to see us adopt is the 24-hour clock. It's ridiculous that we are still dealing with the confusion of AM and PM, especially for thinks like air travel and other travel schedules. The 24-hour clock is easily learned and eliminates all confusion in one blow.
And that would be another example - the 24-hour clock in the US military is an accepted norm, to the point that we often call it "military time."
There are lots of anachronisms in metric countries. Land is sold by the acre in Australia, not the hectare (roughtly 100,000 square feet). Produce in France is often sold by the livre, half kilo or roughly a pound. Computer monitors in France are sold in pouce, thumbs or inches. Altitudes outside of Russia and China are in thousands of feet, not meters, though above 18,000 feet they are actually measurements of atmospheric pressure not elevation.
Meanwhile, we in the US have gone half metric with weights. Produce is sold by the pound and hundredth. No one asks for one pound, four ounces anymore, and the scale would print that as 1.25 pounds.
Also, let's not get into nautical miles versus statute miles. I once worked on a project involving remote sensing at sea, so we had nautical miles, nm, for distance and nanometers, nm, for wavelength. As they used to say in those capsule TV reviews, hilarity ensues.
My favorite weird half-assed measure is the "Kilofoot", used for Telco loop distance (at least historically);.
"Altitudes outside of Russia and China are in thousands of feet, not meters"
This seems wrong to me. Nearly everywhere I've been displays altitudes, whether of buildings, mountains, cities, or just flight altitude during local flights in meters.
Aviation uses English as language and measures altitude in feet to avoid confusion and accidents. At the end of WWII America was dominant, had the most airplanes and most airports, so the American standard became the international standard.
Strictly speaking, altitudes above the ‘transition altitude’ are ‘flight levels’, =pressure altitude/100 above a nominal reference pressure. This ensures that minimum vertical separation is maintained for all traffic. The transition altitude varies from region to region; as kaleberg notes, it is 18,000 feet in US airspace, next above that is FL190.
Worked at a Shell station my first two years in law school, 81 & 82. Shell changed our pumps to liters because it was only a matter of time before the whole nation went metric. Remember McMetrics? Or baseball stadiums putting the distances on the fences in feet & meters? It was a great relief to everyone when they changed them back to gallons.
The idea was to prepare the nation to go metric. Alas Reagan and the R's put a stop to that. Instead, it has occurred piecemeal. American cars once were all American in terms of nuts and bolts, then went through an awkward phase where the chassis might have metric fasteners and the engine American fasteners, and now are universally metric.
I once worked with an older engineer who maintained going metric would make all the machine tools in the country obsolete. Today most tooling is computer controlled so that making a part to American or metric settings is just a matter of flipping a switch or checking a box in the software.
There was an infamous incident in Canada while the metric transition was going on. An Air Canada crew mixed up metric and Imperial units and miscalculated the amount of fuel needed, with the result that the plane ran out of fuel at cruising altitude over Manitoba. Fortunately, the pilot was able to glide it to a safe landing on a disused military air strip. For those who are interested, look up "Gimli glider".
Yes, the story is fascinating.
Pretty sure prescription drugs and nutrients come from the scientific community.
People always talk about grams of fat, sugar, or protein. And of course doctors and nurses measure injections and other things in CCs. Does they count as "scientists"?
Although scientists use the metric system, engineers tend to use "English" units. Not just the usual ones like pounds, feet, and gallons - also things like the foot-pound.
Miscommuncations between engineers and scientists can cause real problems. The NASA Mars Orbiter crashed in 1999 because the engineers at Lockheed Martin had provided certain data in pound-seconds squared which the scientists at the Joint Propulsion Lab interpreted as being in newton-seconds squared.
I used to work for a Boeing supplier. Boeing still is nominally "English" (American really, as most of the standards come from the SAE). I got into it with a Boeing engineer over a stress calculation. Being originally trained as a physicist I typically use the metric system to calculate inertial loads, as I find it much simpler to use a system that has a unit (kg) for mass and a separate unit for force (nt). In contrast the English system uses lb for mass and for force, even though a pound force is equal to a pound mass x 32ft/sec2. The Boeing engineer had used the "English" system and like all too often occurs, forgot to correct account for the 32ft/sec2 and was wrong by a factor of 32.
The only reason metric hasn't been commonly adopted in the US is that Americans would much rather drive five miles to work than some much horribly larger number of kilometers, which would obviously kill them.
Well, that and the fact that the Reagan administration totally nixed the funding for the switch to metric.
Although we talk about pints and fifths, liquor is sold in metric sizes:
Pint = 375 milliliters
Fifth = 750 milliliters
Half gallon = 1.5 litters.
Engine sizes are often given in liters these days.