(Roughly) Daily

Nearly everywhere in the world, folks use the metric system to measure things; here in the U.S. we use the Imperial system. (Note that Britain should really be a dark shade of green– i.e. a little yellow, mixed with a lot of blue. Brits may regularly use inches, ounces, miles, and pounds in everyday life, but have officially been Metric since 1965.)

Mike Sowden (amusingly and informatively) recounts the history of the metric system, then muses on why Imperial measures– the mile, the inch, the cubit, the ell– have staying power…

… Yes, all of these lack precision, so they’re useless for modern science, and would be incredibly dangerous if used for engineering purposes. But they also tell a story of people’s relationship with the space they moved through.

A lexis of movement – perhaps in a similar fashion to the language of landscape that writer Robert MacFarlane has done so much to retrieve.

This is why I’m on the fence about Imperial now. There’s no question that Metric is necessary as a standardised, exact form used to make cars that don’t shake themselves to bits, planes that don’t fall out the sky and spacecraft that can launch themselves to interplanetary targets with mind-blowing accuracy.

But the versions of Imperial still being used by people in everyday life deserve their place in the world too.

Anyone brought up thinking and feeling temperature in Fahrenheit can tell us Celsius-reared folk something different about how we can experience the world. Anyone cooking in pounds will be thinking about food a little differently (“well, it’s just 2 cups, isn’t it?”). All these things are tiny windows into new ways of seeing what we think we already know…

In defense of an old way of measuring: “Why Go Imperial in a World Gone Metric?” from @Mikeachim.

See also: “The real reasons the US refuses to go metric,” and explainer from Verge Science on the last big attempt to turn the US towards Metric, why it failed, and the ways scientists and manufacturers have snuck it in anyway.

* Dave Barry

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As we muse on measurement, we might pause, on Pi Day, for a piece of pi(e)…

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… in celebration of Albert Einstein’s birthday; he was born on this date in 1879.

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“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”