Dear America

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Re: "She could care less" is wrong, it's "She couldn't care less"

I always interpreted this way. "Even my listening to you is caring too much, therefore I could (should) care less than I am right now." But I think either statement is just loaded and best replaced with a better phrasing.

I say we should switch to the metric system since its apparently "better" and because hanging on to an inferior mathematical system due to a mix of nationalism and laziness is generally not a good thing. Also Myanmar/Burma also uses the Imperial System.

On the Soccer/Football thing however, Europe can just shove it. We'll call the game "Dick Ball" if we want to. Its not like there is anyone who plays the game (besides the Latino immigrants) in this country anyway.

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016

I really wish I'd grown up learning the metric system.

Because I can only guesstimate how much, say, a meter is by comparing it to a yard.

I have a vague idea of how much a pound weights, but not a kilogram.

Which is annoying.

I'm a metric system fan. I don't mind MM/DD system, because it clearly defines a chunk and then narrows down from there. It's consistent with HH/MM/SS. When the context of year is clear, it works well.

I know some countries use year before month and date.

So, 2012/9/18?

At least that makes sense, in the same way that 321 makes sense. 213, on the other hand, is just silly.

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

DD/MM just looks weird, though, regardless of how "logical" DD/MM/YYYY is. MM/DD/YYYY is just a result of tacking the year line onto the common (in the US, I don't know about the rest of the world) MM/DD (which I think of as equivalent to "September 19th", as opposed to DD/MM's "19th of September").

'September the 19th' is silly. There is only one September every year.

The date is the 19th (day) of September.

'All he needs is for somebody to throw handgrenades at him for the rest of his life...'

Okay, now you're just deliberately misreading things. Over here, dates are commonly stated as [Month] N^th. I'm pretty sure that if I went out and asked 10 Americans what the date is, I'd hear most of them say "September 19^th", and not "the 19^th of September". In both cases it's implied that "19^th" refers to a day and not that it is the N^th occurrence of a month or the 19^th banana of the month or something silly like that.

We always say 'the 19th of September'. It just sounds better. 'X the Yth' is for monarchs, not days.

'All he needs is for somebody to throw handgrenades at him for the rest of his life...'

No "the". It's [Month] N^th, not [Month] the N^th. "September the 19^th" would not be a common way to state the date, "September 19^th", however, is entirely normal here.

Clearly we should all put all this silliness behind us and go back to speaking German.

edited 19th Sep '12 5:58:07 AM by Balmung

The US Government has been using metric since the 1970s - it merely translates for things released to the general public. All products must have metric measurements along with the Imperial measurements. All scientific and engineering communities in the US use metric. DHHS (health and welfare department) always uses metric. DOE always uses metric. The only government agency that regularly uses Imperial is the department of transportation for obvious reasons as they must translate the most. Metric is taught in schools from elementary school onward.

It's ignorant to assume that metric is not used here at all.

And IDGAF about the dates.

edited 19th Sep '12 7:50:23 AM by Completion

We also use [day]th [month] ("19th September").

edited 19th Sep '12 9:03:21 AM by pagad

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

I see Balmung's point; it just feels more natural, IMO, to put a header (month) and specify (date), than go from the most specific. Just like saying "10 seconds of 30 minutes past 2'o clock in AM" .

Never heard of his majesty August the 2nd?

But yeah, either 2012/09/19 or 19/09/2012 would be logical... so of course the US uses a different version.

Programming and surgery have a lot of things in common: Don't start removing colons until you know what you're doing.

I think the date is really not that big a deal. Most Americans can figure out 19/9/2012 isn't the 19th month of the year. I think a lot of people forget that Americans can figure stuff out.

Then again, it's usually month/day paired together and year just added separately, like Sept 19, 2012. 9/19/12 is just an abbreviation.

Think, 10/12/11 can mean anything.

It can get legitimately confusing to people familiar with one system of the other when the date format is such that it could refer to, say, 3rd June 2012 or March 6th 2012.

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

@Trivialis: My OCD demands that date be 10/11/12.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian

The date thing is a silly thing to argue about, conventions are just so everyone understands one another; as long as everyone uses the same convention the logic or not is irrelevant.

I like farenheit for weather temperature because: 1. I'm used to it and 2. It gives a finer gradation without using pesky decimals. Temperature is completely conventional, so one system is not more rational than another, just different. Really, the most rational system would be one where absolute zero, was zero on the scale of temperature too, but the other end could be whereever someone took it into their pointy little head to make it. So I guess you could say I like Kelvin best, but good luck with getting everyone to switch.

I like the imperial system for time, short distances, and small volumes. Mostly because it is much friendlier to halving, thirding, doubling and tripling than the metric system is. Twelve inches has more factors than 10 centimeters. A sixty minute hour can be divided evenly by a bunch more factors than a hundred minute hour, making it easier to organize my day. I have no clue what metric degrees look like, in the sense of angles, rather than temperature; but 360 is divisable by so very many factors that it makes a lot of sense for doing geometry for architecture or any other spatial endeavor.

I was under the vague impression that the Romans got their system from the Babylonians, so Imperial has deep roots in time; and I think the Babylonians did base sixty, though that's something I'm quite unsure of.

For miles vs. kilometers I'm neutral, both are large enough that my mind doesn't really grasp them as distances and I'd be just as happy to measure large distances in one as the other.

Science does seem more decimal based than real life, so the metric does make sense for that.

And really, the folks that will do best would be those that are comfortable in both. My guess is that, like being multilingual, being multimeasural would have advantages in processing ideas and situations.

Re: Temperature: Clearly, we're all wrong, and we should be using degrees Urist. On the Urist scale, freezing is 10000 degrees and the units are the same as Fahrenheit. Yes, this means that Absolute Zero is 9508.33 degrees Urist. Problem?

Or, there's also the Rankine scale, which uses Absolute Zero as the 0 degree point and Fahrenheit scale degrees. You know, if you just want to be different.

Celsius makes far more sense to me because 0C is the temperature at which water freezes and 100C is the temperature it boils at normal pressure levels. Fahrenheit seems more arbitrary to me, and Kelvin is based upon the same scale as the Celsius system so it's fairly easy to convert between them.

The date is confusing because not everyone uses the same convention. I use DD/MM/YY, but about half the people around me use MM/DD/YY, and some people use YY/MM/DD. If I'm talking about something happening on the 2nd of May 2012, there's no way to know if I actually mean the 5th of February 2012 or the 12th of May 2002.

Metric is easier to use, for me, because the same base is used for every measurement and it's easier to convert between them. If something is 167 m, it's obviously 16.7 dm or 1.67 cm or 0.0167 mm or 0.167 km. Whereas (correct me if I'm wrong) there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and 1500 yards in a mile? How do you convert between that?

I've never used decimal time but it sounds hella sounds cool.

Yards is something or other. I never cared for converting yards to miles and went through feet since I do remember that there are 5280 feet in a mile.

I don't use Celsius because I just plain don't know what the weather is going to be like from looking at it. In Fahrenheit, if there are three digits, it's really fucking hot, if it's 90+, it's still pretty fucking hot, if it's 80+, it's still rather warm, around 70 is pretty nice, around 60 is getting chilly, around 50 is chilly, 40 means get a coat on, it be cold, 30s means it's freezing (or almost), 20s is COLD, 10s is very cold, single digits means it's frickin' cold, and negative degrees means it's too damn cold. Celsius, on the other hand, means nothing practical to me. My weather tellamajig says it's 75 degrees Fahrenheit. I know this is a little warm, but nice. 24 degrees Celsius is simply not a meaningful quantity to me however. I have no mental concept of "1 degree Celsius", or "20 degrees Celsius", so its all meaningless numbers to me.

edited 19th Sep '12 5:57:35 PM by Balmung

Yeah, a yard is three feet, and 3 inches short of a metre.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian