House of Eratosthenes

Just for the record, when in the course of human events you have the luxury of developing a measurement system before you’ve gathered real-world things for it to measure — or depending on your point of view, if ever you’re laboring under the curse of delivering on that responsibility unable to escape from that state of ignorance — I think carving up that vast space of mass, temperature, linear, area and volume measurement in powers of ten makes a lot of sense. We are naturally inclined to do it anyway, whenever we speak of extraordinarily large or small units of time or space, even when we base such observations on the Imperial system. “Millionths of an inch,” “billions of years ago,” “thousands of pounds,” etc.

However — and the following is really just my opinion, I can’t prove it, but I’m very sure I’m right about this. The imperial system isn’t going anywhere, at least not anytime soon. I have a lot of reasons for maintaining this opinion. Perhaps the biggest factor in the conclusions I’ve reached, I’ve gleaned from simply observing the behavior of Metric System advocates. They recite things to themselves they’ve already recited before, much like Hillary supporters were repeating over and over how she’s squash Donald Trump like a cockroach. Except some of what the meter-head people say, is technically true, like “All the countries in the world except U.S. and a couple others have already officially adopted/switched.” Yes, officially. Officially. The question this should inspire is: How come there are so many countries that officially use the metric system, while at the same time unofficially using something else? The United Kingdom. Canada. Poland. And many more countries, when you start talking about measurements that are life-and-death…like, what’s the altitude of my plane. It’s only the U.S. and Myanmar that use feet? Eh…not correct.

Consider the voluntary self-torture taking place in the countries that have “officially switched,” but not really. Anyone who has experience using both systems at the same time, knows that’s where the pain is. Reasonable hold-outs, like me, would choose the metric system in an instant over the both-at-the-same-time nonsense. That’s where passenger jets take off without enough fuel, because someone measured out pounds of the stuff instead of kilograms. And I’m sure all the most reasonable surrender-monkeys from all up & down the Champs-Élysées would agree with me, such a hybrid bastardization should be discarded in favor of pure King’s-English measurement, if they were forced to choose one out of only those two options. So no one gets killed, and we don’t have to stop in the middle of a cocktail-napkin dimensioning exercise to say to ourselves “uh…er…divided by 2.54…em…”

So whichever measurement system makes it to Mars first, should ban the other one forever, planet-wide. But which one is better?

High Cube It’s a myth that the metric system is, as I hear so often, “vastly superior.” Do we even need to take the claim seriously? It hasn’t sent the other one packing yet. And no, you can’t blame stubborn troglodytes like me for being inflexible about it. Fact is, when people speak of landing the “Finish Him!!” killing blow against the imperial measurement system as if this was some episode out of Mortal Kombat, they don’t know what they’re saying. They fail to comprehend the sheer magnitude of destruction their fantasies would entail, should they ever meet up with reality. Trucks. Rail cars. Freight ships. The engines that make them all go. The bolts that hold the engines together. The buildings. The land. The townships. The sections. The U.S. is the only hold-out? Well…how much stuff we got. That’s a question someone needs to answer before we start throwing yardsticks in the wood chipper.

This isn’t just idle inertia that can be depleted through attrition. It’s been gaining momentum, a great deal of this taking place well after the metric system had its first shot at success.

Fact is, you can’t put together the case that either system is “superior/inferior in every way.” They aren’t trying to do the same thing. With the Imperial measurement system, you have the inch, followed by a factor of twelve. Then the foot. And a factor of three, followed by the yard…followed by a HUGE gap, a factor of 1,760. Then comes the mile. How come? Well, with your horse racing you had rods and furlongs, which have fallen into obscurity, so it cannot be said this enormous gap of factor-1760 has always sat there, undivided and unmolested. But that’s the point here. It’s all based on practical need. The same holds true for cooking. You have teaspoons and tablespoons and ounces and pints, because that’s what we need to measure. After the pints quarts & gallons, there’s not much…a few antiquated units like the hogshead. But as far as measurement units that are unambiguous and can actually be used to measure, and communicate, that’s it. If you want to talk about the volume of water behind a dam, we settle for decimalization, as in hundreds of millions of cubic feet…

Settle for. See? Just like with the millionths of an inch. We use that numerology not as a preference, but as a better-than-nothing.

The imperial system came from need. “Let’s come up with a unit to measure this thing.” The metric system, as I pointed out in the first paragraph up there, comes from dividing up the measurement space first…then going out to get the data afterward.

Decimalization is something we avoid when we can, because the number ten is not good as a base for these purposes. It can only be divided by itself, one, five and two. People think the imperial measurement is nonsensical because it’s got these big intimidating numbers in it, like 5,280 for linear feet in a mile, or 43,560 for square feet in an acre. They’re not thinking about it right. They need to be thinking about it in terms of factor trees, just like the guy who invented the measurement unit. Number of feet in a mile, is divisible by 2 five times, by 3, by 5 and by eleven. It’s a wonderful number. An acre could be 264 feet on one side and 165 feet on another side. There are 640 of them in a square mile. The numbers aren’t easy to carry around in your head, they’re not built for that. They’re built to make it so that even moderately complex surveying and allocation jobs, end up with whole numbers. Eleventh of a mile, that’s 480 feet. Eighth of a square mile, that’s 80 acres.

Contrasted with…wife wants me to make a spice rack with three columns, out of 1 meter boards. How to do?

So over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, in a number of places some friends were kicking the dog shit out of me about the metric system being so vastly superior or something. I appreciated it a lot because I was just finishing a 750ml of wine…which, if it were sold in quarts the way the Good Lord intended, I’d still have had another glass left. (There is some irony there, but also there’s a whole sub-topic of manufacturers and whole industries taking advantage of the turmoil to put a thumb on the scale, to the detriment of the customer.) One of them raised an interesting snotty question: Okay smart guy, what’s a third of a (16-oz.) pound? Eh…who cares. The answer is five ounces, or six ounces, somewhere around there. Nobody’s going to storm out of the house angry because you made your Chicken Almondine with a fraction of an ounce too many slivered almonds. But, what about if the measurement has to be precise? Like, troy ounces of gold or something. Dunno. “Don’t go trying to buy a seventh of a troy ounce just so you can bitch about something, like an asshole” would be my default answer. Obviously this scheme of choosing composite numbers to avoid fractional output, isn’t and cannot be intended to address every scenario. It’s just supposed to address most. Which has worked pretty well. The entire civilized world has been built on it.

Womanly Measurements No really, it has. All those more sophisticated countries that have “officially adopted the metric system”? What’s the bust-waist-hip measurement of a sexy girl in those countries, 36″ 24″ 36″? Nope. They haven’t bothered to compute it, have they? How about time-of-day? I know there are people who will not and perhaps cannot buy into the “easy to divide if not to multiply” argument, I’ve spoken with them about this at length. So how come they’re not measuring time-of-day in centidays, which would be 14 minutes 24 seconds each, or in millidays? One says, because it’s not a standard…when it’s a standard, I’ll do it. Okay. So we’re not talking about technology here, if anything we’re talking about the opposite of technology. That’s what “I’ll do it when everyone else is already doing it” is, the opposite of technology. But the real reason we don’t tell time that way is, it’s too hard. Dividing the day up into 24 and then 60 parts makes sense, because 24 and 60 are nice composite numbers.

My verdict is: Whatever makes sense. If I’m replacing the head gasket on a Suzuki engine, metric system is my first choice. Well of course it is. Using a 1/2″ socket on a 12mm bolt head is just going to cause excessive wear & tear on the parts, and be frustrating…who needs it. I really don’t have much by way of grievances against the M.S. Only one: I don’t like the attitude. The “Lookit me, I’m being scientific and stuff because I’m using metric.” It reeks of nerd. Like someone’s been watching way too many episodes of Star Trek. It stinks of confusing the gonna-dooz with the have-dunz…as in, see, we’re GONNA build this thing with meters and centimeters, and then we’re GONNA have some kind of warp drive and do these amazing things. If you talk about it awhile, you’ll notice a lot of the metric “accomplishments” are like that. We’re GONNA explore the solar system. Right after the metric system is GONNA kick the old imperial system’s butt…

But as far as the things already done, the big accomplishments are mostly owned by the older system M.S. was supposed to replace. This newer system, far from gaining steam as we go along, is losing it. “No math, just move the decimal point around to the left or the right” is no longer an argument that can land a solid punch. Not with everyone & his dog walking around with a supercomputer at their fingertips. Come to think of it, factoring in everything we know now, it’s the metric system that is better suited to the surveyors of George Washington’s time, painstakingly drawing their lines in the swampland in their muddy boots.

Furthermore, we’re not talking about actual content. What people are forgetting is that these are MEASURING SYSTEMS. Measurements of things, are not the things they measure. They’re just measurements of them. Finding a different way to measure a thing, doesn’t have any effect on what the thing is.

Thing I Know #455. Expressing an idea in a different way, or with a different language, doesn’t make the idea any more or less brilliant.

This is where the crunchy-frogs are off track. Your starship isn’t any more or less likely to reach Pluto or beyond, based on whether you decided to make it 100 meters or 330 feet. If you really do think that has a bearing on things, then we’d have to settle that by looking at history…and history doesn’t make the metric system look good.

But what do I know? I’ve only had the propaganda forced on me since the mid-1970’s. Maybe it’s an age thing. These days, you can be well into what’s accepted as “middle age,” but still not yet have become fully aware of your surroundings by the time we had that Ford-n-Carter boondoggle with all the taxpayer-funded infomercials and cutesy commercial jingles. By the time you reach my range of decrepitude, you’ve spent more than forty years hearing about how it’s the wave of the future…unavoidable…any day now. Well, said boondoggle was the absolute apex of the metric-system momentum, or has been up until now.

I’m loath to recommend academic works to anyone, but you’d love James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. It’s all about these attempts at standardization and how they end up concealing all kinds of social reality. You get guys like the architect Le Corbusier, who called houses “machines for living” and meant it. He wanted the whole world living in these huge tower blocks like in the awful new Judge Dredd remake. And of course UN types let this clown design entire cities, like Chandigarh, India. It’s beautifully efficient, symmetrical, mechanical… and nobody who isn’t forced to would ever live there. But it’s just so vastly superior on paper….
- Severian | 08/19/2017 @ 19:20
Seems to me The Fountainhead went into this kind of thing at length, essentially using buildings as metaphors for these efforts that involve some degree of complexity.
- mkfreeberg | 08/19/2017 @ 20:44
I may be way off the mark here, but there also seems to be a political factor to these “vastly superior system” arguments. When I remember getting the Metric VSS ™ argument in the 70’s and 80’s, I recall vague interjections of “Europeans have adopted this for YEARS and look how much better than white-trash conservative flag-waving Americans they are!”

Of course, like you said, these VSS always have a way of breaking down when analyzed. My uncle LOVES to argue about the VSS Linux system. Really, there’s almost NOTHING superior about Linux, other than the fact that it’s free. But ever since Linus Torvalds haxxored a student copy of Unix gifted to him at University and then passed it out to various friends and colleagues as his own, we’ve had to listen to how VSS it is by our liberal betters as it’s really ‘sticking it’ to those capitalist pigs who graciously loaned him a copy in the first place.
- P_Ang | 08/20/2017 @ 07:26
Well you know my thoughts about liberalism: It’s all brought about by failure to mature. What do we want people to learn as they mature? “The world is not here just for my own convenience.”

And so I’ve noticed this about meter-heads. I rent a car, start it up and find the instruments are in km, go “WTF???” This is a long-overdue expansion of my tiny primitive world, and I should push through the pain because the antiseptic works that’s why it stings. I’ve got it coming, anyway.

THEY rent a car, find the instruments are in m/ph, go “WTF???” — their discomfort is hard evidence of the VSS-ness. Also, they’ve been triggered and now they’re in Big Lebowski mode: This aggression will not stand, man…
- mkfreeberg | 08/20/2017 @ 07:36
[…] a question someone needs to answer before we start throwing yardsticks in the wood chipper. House of Eratosthenes baldilocks: Black Americans: The Organized Left’s Expendable Shock […]
- Lemonade Stands In the Labyrinth - American Digest | 08/20/2017 @ 09:19
The most frustrating thing is when I go to repair my Ford Ranger and they use metric AND standard hardware on some component. Now just WTF is that all about!?!
- tim | 08/22/2017 @ 13:31
Your point about factorization of customary English units is well-taken and, and you note, actually represents the historical rational for the system.

However, the units situation is somewhat worse than you imagine. An engineer might encounter three American systems:

1. pound-force/pound-mass/foot/sec (your Imperial system and a gravitational system, F = ma/gc) [Note: the American version differs from the British version in the definition of the gallon, 4 qts vs 5 qts. There is also a surveyors foot and an engineers foot.]

2. pound-force/slug (mass)/foot/sec (a dynamic system, F = ma)

3. poundal (force)/pound-mass/foot/sec (a dynamic system)

or four metric systems,

1. dyne/gram/centimeter/second (dynamical, cgs, the original metric system)

2. newton/kilogram/meter/second (dynamical, mks)

3. SI: newton/kilogram/meter/second (dynamical)

4. kg-force/kg-mass/meter/sec (gravitaional, F = ma/gc)

The various metric system differ in the definitions of their electromagnetic units. The last, kg-force etc, is the European analogue of the Imperial System. Both are gravitational, which means that force and mass are defined independently of one another, so Newton’s law has to be written with the justly infamous g-sub-c, defined at 32.17 lbm ft/(lbf sec^2)

The American version of the Imperial System is actually defined in terms of the SI system, one inch is defined to be 2.54 cm in law.

The US was a charter member of the metric system and has been officially (but not in practice) metric for over 100 years.

Metric cultists are tedious in the extreme, the Antifas cult in STEM.
- Bob Sykes | 08/24/2017 @ 05:24
Yes the Newton thing makes a lot of sense. If I worked in any kind of engineering that had to do with propulsion, I’d absolutely use SI.

Of course, since we have computers, even there it must be said there wouldn’t be much penalty involved if I went the other way. But, yes, Metric is superior in the acknowledgement that force != weight.

I’m also picking up a 15mm open-end wrench this weekend. Because I’ve got a project that involves a 15mm nut. Whatever is right for the job…
- mkfreeberg | 08/24/2017 @ 06:35
You might like to know that my John Deere riding mower has both metric and US parts.
- Bob Sykes | 08/24/2017 @ 17:55
Then, neither system should be blamed for the pain that occasionally ensues.

People seem to forget, this is where the angst really starts. With the mixing.
- mkfreeberg | 08/24/2017 @ 18:52
[…] of the building, whether that window pane fits in that wall, whether the measurements are in crunchy-frog system or in God’s […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/02/2017 @ 19:37

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The Crunchy Frog Measuring System
Saturday, August 19th, 2017