It should be obvious why the US stays on the imperial system. There is an opportunity cost to switch that is greater than the current ongoing cost of translation. Thus, someone has to bite the bullet and assume losses to push metric. Throughout the world, the organization that put the foot down and ate the bill has almost always been the government - but the US government operates on short term results. The politician that inconveniences the public today with a metric conversion doesn't have his seat tomorrow, and his replacement immediately halts proceedings.
Language isn't close to a solved problem. Hopefully the next hundred years can finally see the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel for a generation of the world soon to come. But there also needs to be a legitimate reason for us to want to unify language. If we operate independently of one another and let businesses control any interactions by proxy of money, we will stay separate.
As the U.S. loses political importance and mindshare, sites will stop using U.S. units. Conversion to metric will eventually happen.
As for language, I'm kind of split. On one hand language is a tool for communication that becomes more efficient the more standardized it is. On the other hand, language is closely related to art and culture. I'm Icelandic (and a poet at heart) and I love my language deeply. I can succintly say things in Icelandic that can't esaily be expressed in English. And that probably applies to every language.
So I'm torn. I don't want to lose my language. But I also want a more integrated world.
I have three kids and I seriously doubt their kids won't speak the language of their parents (assuming they'll live in Iceland).
The transition happens much slower, although I've been watching it accelerate over the past couple of decades. English is encroaching on the language. We speak Icelandic, but there are small grammatical changes happening, making the language more English - and at the same time, we're losing Icelandic vocabulary.
My prediction is that my grandkids (that's probably at least 13-15 years in the future (hopefully)) will speak Icelandic very similar to what I do, it'll just be a liiiittle different.
But these small changes will certainly accumulate and the pace of change will probably accelerate with more communication and integration. So who knows what will happen in the next 50-100 years.
Welsh was pretty much wiped out as the far more practical use of English press over the centuries. About 50 years ago there was a political movement to re-introduce it, laws were past to ensure that government communicated in Welsh on request , roadsigns were bilingual, and Welsh was taught in schools (which is probably just as useful as French being taught in schools).
Language is the major barrier of freedom, I can theoretically get a job and move to Dublin, London, Berlin, Rome, Cadiz, Porto, Budapest, Taliin or Athens. In reality the language prevents it in most cases.
In 100 years time we could either live in a fuedal society where you can live/work in a small area owned by a local baron who reports to an international mega corporation, with international style communications in a language nobody knows - just like 14th century England and Latin, or we could have a free borderless world where there is fictionless movement and communication. I hope technology will enable the latter before the former entrenchs again.
The problem is public opinion. Americans either don't care or think imperial is superior.
It doesn't have to be a federal law. Change can start gradually with private companies. Pokemon Go, for instance, shows only kilometers and doesn't offer imperial units as an option. All water bottles in the US have both mililiters and fluid ounces on their label.
From what I understand, most construction and other raw materials are all measured in metric units, then converted to imperial at final sale if needed.
For instance, a 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood down at Home Depot isn't really 4 x 8 feet; it actually has an imperial measurement of 47.938 x 95.938 inches, which is approximately 1217 x 2437 mm - the standard metric size is 1220 x 2440 mm:
Thicknesses (as noted in the table too) have similar "whole" metric numbers. You see this also on some (not all) general materials sold to the American consumer public - the actual material is metric sized, but marketed with imperial measurements.
I think this is done both for cultural reasons, as well as just "momentum" and that the public is used to it. But the reality is (almost) everything is now metric, the public just isn't fully aware of it yet.
This doesn’t pass commen sense for me. Plywood measured in metric, converted to imperial if needed? I can imagine someone coming up with 4 feet by 8 feet as a standard size for building material. I don’t see them coming up with 1220mm x 2440mm and thinking “nailed it, perfect size for calculating how many of these to make a wall!”
Also, since the gap between plywood takes space, plywood (and drywall) is a bit less than stated size to give you breathing room to put 4x8s repeating every 4 and 8 feet.
That said I don’t know why a nominal 2×4 is actually 1½ × 3½. Used to be finishing work shaved it down, now they just make ‘em that way to be ornery.
The sizing is also dependent on intent. Floor underlayment is not the exact same size as furniture grade plywood. And MDF is actually 49"x97" to give you some extra room if you are laminating a veneer on it. It is true that various plywoods come in metric thickness though. Especially those made in China.
Legacy of the 1970s-1980s attempt to move the US onto the metric standard.
Don't tell people who are annoyed by metric, but all the 'imperial' units we use now are 100% based on metric units. Our metrology has been metric since that time, all the day-to-day usage is derived units.
Which is why an inch is exactly 2.54cm instead of some rounded fraction.
Dvorak is something anyone can use on their own any time. I imagine it is much more successful than Esperanto, because the only point of language is communication. It is the Facebook problem - you need a large network of participants to make a language work, or the language fails its purpose.
Also, Esperanto is ugly as fuck. It has I believe 4 accented letters, and I have no idea why anyone would think when divising a new language that accents or umlauts are good ideas (unless all the letters supported them and had consistent meaning). Otherwise, just use new characters.
Imperial units are better, and I expect the world will convert to them in the next century. They're sane and easily divisible into eighths and more with a single significant digit of the next smaller unit, while going from 1 kilo to 125 grams is a awkward increase in digits. They're human scale: a pound is generally about a big handful, while a gram is hardly an easily estimated quantity for humans and a kilogram is awkwardly big to hold in one's hand. A cup and a pint are useful amounts of water to drink, while a liter is a bit more than a useful quantity to measure such things by. An inch is a knuckle on my finger, and a foot is the length of my forearm, while a meter is difficult to measure without a reference and a centimeter is a useful unit but I don't have an inbuilt measuring unit that long. I could go on, but I think this is a sufficient set of examples: metric is difficult to use for casual estimation (which is, after all, what one does most of the time, imperial is designed to be on a human scale and is better for everyday use and estimation.
Edit: Not sarcasm. I work with imperial daily farming, and worked with metric doing chemistry in college.
> expect the world will convert to them in the next century.
> Edit: Not sarcasm.
Heh. I think you'd be disappointed. I haven't heard of of any modern country seriously considering moving from metric to imperial units.
> They're sane and easily divisible into eighths and more with a single significant digit of the next smaller
Divisible maybe. But definitely not sane.
Let's take a look at lengths and weights for example:
How many inches in a foot? 12. Ok. Then it must be 12 feet in a yard. Nope. It's 3. How many yards in a mile? Guessing 1000 or 1200. Nope. Apparently 1760.
Let's try weights. Going up from ounces. Since we already did imperial lengths and saw there are 12 inches in a foot, guessing there should be 12 ounces in a pound. Wrong again. It's 16. Ok, so then 1 US ton should be 1600 pounds right? Nope, wrong again. Apparently it is 2000!
I grew up with metric then came to US and lived here for more than a decade. Apart from knowing how many inches in a foot I had to look up all the other ones because they are non-intuitive and don't follow any pattern to me. I can estimate how much is a yard, an ounce, a pound, an inch, and a foot. But again I could intuitively estimate things even better when it came to meters, kilometers and kilograms.
This is so America-centric it baffles me, you sound delusional, especially that you think countries will convert to imperial. There is no country in the world thinking about that, and a lot of countries have converted from imperial to metric.
Your biggest complaints are that (1) metric units are not quantities you use in everyday life and (2) that you don't know how large a metric quantity is.
Both are just because you are unfamiliar with the system, people working with this system do not have this problem at all. Regarding (1), people don't care that a litre is too large too drink, they just know that a glass is 0.2-0.25L, so you can get 4-5 glasses out of a litre bottle. The benefit base 10 units is that they're easy to convert and use, people don't care if something is in cL/dL/L because it's just a comma placement away.
Regarding (2), people have a very good feeling about how big their everyday units are. E.g. a metre is about a step (large/small step depending on your size), that's fine for rough measurements, and about as (in)accurate as your "a foot is my forearm".
The point about fractions is actually somewhat interesting. The fractions thing seems to be a uniquely American thing to me. When I grew up in Germany people rarely used fractions other than half and third. You'd never here 1/8 or 1/16. I still remember being surprised when I first encountered a quarter. I still don't think in fractions but in multiples of ten. Now you make the point that even the imperial grab bag of unrelated units lends itself somehow better to that. I wonder where that cultural difference comes from.
It's really useful in cases where you need an answer a question like "I want to drill a hole in the middle of this board which is 12.25 (12 and 1/4) inches long." It's easier to for me to split that in half in my head than divide the fraction and find the corresponding mark on my tool.
Half of 12 is 6, half of 1/4 is 1/8, I drill the hole at 6 and 1/8".
It's easy to get a fractional measurement of whatever is in front of you and immediately work with that measurement in your head then find the corresponding mark on your measuring tool. There is no reason the same system would not work with metric, it just seems to be more common with imperial units.
In metric-land, standard measurements for things are used to make things like that easily divisible.
E.g. IKEA cabinets are 60 cm wide (90, or 120 for larger cabinets), common countertop depth is 60 cm, and so on.
That way we get to use sane and consistent units and we can easily see/measure the middle of a 60cm piece of wood or whatever.
It also tickles me how eyeballing these things is apparently something desirable. Whenever I work around my house I measure everything twice to be sure...
This has nothing to do with eyeballing, I hope I did not give that impression. In the imperial measurement world there are also standard sizes of things but that's not the point. Using a fractional scale (not necessarily imperial!) does have benefits in some situations, such as measuring and working with some arbitrary object placed in front of you. Measuring twice is not unique to the metric system and is very common in the imperial unit world as well.
Not everything in the world is (or should be) provided by Ikea :)
You're right about meters not being as good a "human scale" measurement as feet. The idea of average height being 1.8 m is pretty awkward on its face. Turns out, though, the metric world has settled on starting with centimeters, though. But it's not clear that this is better, because now you end up throwing around high magnitude numbers like "183 cm" rather than "6 ft".
Given that we're clearly comfortable going with a diminutive unit (viz. cm vs m), I've always thought it would be better for the world to settle on the decimeter as the reference unit instead. It's larger than a centimeter but smaller than a meter, which is what we're after, and it's about the width of one's hand, which is arguably a more natural choice for something "human scale" than the foot. The snag is that "foot" still rolls of the tongue a lot more easily that "decimeter". So we go ahead and say 1 dm = "1 hand". It's a great unit, because if we want, we can scale up or down to meters and centimeters with (base 10-derived) constant factors, which is so easy that anybody can do it in their head.
The only snag left is that "hand" is already in use as a unit. This turns out to be less problematic than it sounds, because the legacy hand is an obscure unit really only used in horse breeding. And we're in luck, because as its name suggests, the imperial "hand" is named after the span of one's hand (with fingers extended), so they're roughly the same—it's not as if you end up with one name for two wildly differing sizes. This is the same kind of "conversational equivalence" we get with a ton and a metric tonne. That is, in conversation you're basically never reduced to needing the speaker to clarify which it is that he or she means, because you just don't need that kind of precision—a ton and a tone are both two very large masses that are in the same ballpark as one another.
Perhaps most importantly, the transition from feet to hands is fairly straightforward in conversational use, because end up saying that "1 ft" equals "about 3 hands".
People make a big deal about pi versus tau, but getting widespread adoption of the "hand" as a unit seems to me to be a much more worthwhile cause, because it would have a much bigger practical impact on everyday life than tau ever would.
The EU states pint glasses must be 568ml (or larger with a line to the level) and measured in a sane and consistent way. Bit like BS standards and crown marking, but makes trade easier - if I make pint glasses for use in the UK, in Greece, and in Spain, I don't need to get 3 standards bodies to approve them.
The organizations that spend a lot of time thinking about units are heavily weighted towards the sciences, where those kind of properties are less useful and various properties of metric are very useful.
Language isn't close to a solved problem. Hopefully the next hundred years can finally see the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel for a generation of the world soon to come. But there also needs to be a legitimate reason for us to want to unify language. If we operate independently of one another and let businesses control any interactions by proxy of money, we will stay separate.