All of Those Scrap Drill Bits!

[pfredX1]

Accept or reject whatever you want. But by the same token I expect to get extended the same courtesy. As my life is not lived on your one way street.

[Ed Weldon]

Marv - I did read it (again for the 4th time since it followed my own comment). You wrote an excellent essay there. It's a keeper. But maybe not the best response to my attempt at humor.
We commend those great names of the enlightenment that gave us the metric system and it's logic, imperfect as it is. They are like the people who inspired and created our form of government, which 200 and some years on is showing its shortcomings. Stuck with a base 10 mindset a product of Eurasian development, and only one good constant (a northern hemisphere measurement) they had a choice between 1/10 meter, one meter and 10 meters as the base linear measurement. None of these are as close to human scale as the inch and the foot. Close to human scale is very important because they represent the measure of the most important things in our lives, the food we eat (inches) and the space around us needed for security (feet) both of which are most easily counted in low number integers. But short of a world population catastrophe in some dystopian future the metric system we have is not going to change. But I'm pretty confident that the "American" system will be slowly replaced as folks like myself die off and new generations will be educated in and make greater use of metric measures.

[bob1275]

US and UK still have a few non metric items, miles, weight in pounds which i'm sure we'll keep as long as possible.
We had our old currency system until 1970's, and kids laugh when we tell them about pounds shillings and pence.
It sounds like a few of you in US feel very strongly so I suggest you get the Donald to impose a duty on all imports that are metric. Should upset a few more people around the world.
Do love reading this thread.

[mklotz]

...Close to human scale is very important because they represent the measure of the most important things in our lives, the food we eat (inches) and the space around us needed for security (feet) both of which are most easily counted in low number integers...

If the meter lacks the anatomical connections you seem to think so important, why did the medieval British find it so important to define and use the yard which is very close to the length of a meter?

[Ed Weldon]

Marv - Your question about the British measurement, the yard is interesting. A subject for a bit of research. I have been reading, of late, about the subject of property rights, especially with respect to England. Might be a connection there. Ed Weldon

[pfredX1]

Yeah a centimeter is a poor excuse for an inch and metric has nothing equivalent to the foot. As the decimeter never really caught on. Not that a decimeter is even a decent foot itself. More like a third of a foot. It is a completely useless unit of measurement so unpopular many metric advocates have never even heard of it. Meters are close to yards but yards themselves are not the most useful unit of measurement themselves. They seem largely relegated to the task of rough approximation to me. Millimeters are only good for making my eyes glaze over when I try to look at them on a scale. Though they're not really small enough for precision work. It is two hundredths of a millimeter to the thousandth of an inch. At least it is a nice round number. It still doesn't simplify any calculations I may have to make though. None of that touted metric conversion nonsense is ever handy for me either. I just don't do that sort of thing with any kind of regularity for that to have weight with me. So in short metric comes up short as far as I'm concerned. Simple? Perhaps a bit too simple to the point where it is overly austere.

[pfredX1]

Realize that British measurements and the US customary units share names but not values. When we broke with the crown we went all out.

[ncollar]

Fred
I have been thinking a lot about this subject and am lost. Who in their right mind would take a foot to set up a system that is workable. The size of feet is so vast just whose foot did they use. I was in a shoe store and the sizes were great, from little tiny things to great big size 16-17. The metric system is much simpler than that stupid fractions. I was so glad to see micrometers and calipers are set up on 100 divisions. That is the only good thing about the system that has been shoved down our throats. Like I said we were taught the metric system in the 70's and we still do not use it almost 50 years later. Every one uses the fractions and 90% of graduates can not even make change from a dollar which is bases on 100 divisions which is the same as the metric system. Go figure??
Nelson

[Jon]

3 posts split out into the Off-Topic forum.