Talk:Anti-metrication

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This article was nominated for deletion on 22 March 2006. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

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Contents 1 Absolutely not neutral and sometimes ridiculous 2 Wine bottling information wrong 3 SI units in everyday life 4 English phonology

[edit] Absolutely not neutral and sometimes ridiculous

This article is per definition not neutral, since it is called "Anti". Some arguments are simply ridiculous, especially in the view of one who grew up with the metric system. Examples:

• In the first paragraph ("Natural evolution and human scale") the development of other measures (however they are called) are compared with a "Darwinian evolution by natural selection". If one really wants to compare the development witch evolution, then the metric system is on the top of the evolution. It succeeded almost all over the world. People in countries with the metric system use most of the units even in private life (and don't know any other) although they don't have to. But it's nonsense to compare the development of measures with Darwin's evolution anyway. All measures had to be defined once, otherwise one could not measure with them.
• My english is not good enough to understand the second paragraph ("High modernism and 'legibility'") completely. But it sounds somehow like "the French invented it, they wanted to rule the world with it, so don't use it if you don't want that they rule the world". I can tell you, people think as much of France if they use a meter, as they think of Germany if they use Fahrenheit. Additional there is a quote: "Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books." from James C. Scott. Okay, nice, but what is an acre? Acre is not part of the metric system.
• 3th paragraph ("Price inflation"): Companies might try to use a change in the system to increase prices. Simple solution: Law could force them to use both, the new and the old measure, for some years. But: "Those educated in the old measures, and able to make conversions, may spot this. But those educated since the abolition of customary measures will not necessarily do so." ??? I certainly don't know what my grand grandparents paid for a can of beans and how much was in it before the metric system was used. But what would it change when I knew? I'm sure they paid less than I do now, but prices are changing far more often than measure systems.
• 4th paragraph ("Unit confusion"): Things one doesn't know could be confused. That applies to all changes of everything, it's no argument against the metric system itself. If one once knows, that "m" (milli) means 1/1000, "c" (centi) 1/100 and "k" (kilo) 1000, it's rather difficult to confuse "mm" with "cm". It's much less confusing than all the gallons and miles.
• 5th paragraph ("Tradition"): The redefinitions of the metric units were very, very small and only important for exact scientific use. This cannot be compared with the large changes of other units (The mile ranges from ~1,000 m to ~11,000 m).
• 6th paragraph ("Æsthetics"): Oh my god! Are you serious? I can't believe it. Here I wanted to place my comment to this paragraph. I'm glad that someone already (partially) did this in the last sub paragraph. I can't comment such nonsense seriously.
• The rest seems rather okay. But some citations are missing. --84.60.205.127 23:54, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, the paragraph about high modernism is more about state-imposed standards than the French ruling the world. Traditional societies use locally useful units because they were defined with reference to what would be most useful to them. Government bureaucrats, by contrast, seek to impose uniform measurements on all because of the need for central administration. - Smerdis of Tlön 14:40, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I might be noted that such units as you find in the imperial and U.S. customary systems are not examples of "home-grown" measures and were no less government-imposed than any metric ones. Yes, I agree that the current title Anti-metrication invites bias. Jimp 07:20, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wine bottling information wrong

Under the "Government Compulsion" heading, refering to the United States, there is the following sentence:

"Wine may also be bottled or packed in containers of 4 liters or larger if the containers are filled and labeled in quantities of even liters (4 liters, 6 liters, etc.)"

This statement is clearly incorrect, as every liquor store I have ever been in (this includes stores in a number of different US states) sells box-wine in 5 liter plastic bladders. I haven't edited this because I have no idea what the law actually states in this area. Grokmoo 17:54, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps the person who put this in meant by "even litres" a whole number of litres, so that 5.5 litres would be disallowed but 7 litres would be OK. Perhaps the example just used some unfortunate numbers. In any case, if there is no citation it may be deleted. --Gerry Ashton 18:49, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] SI units in everyday life

I would like to present the informal definitions of the SI-units, since from my point of view they provide an argument pro-metric system.

These definitions come in extremly handy when doing back-of-an-envelope calculations.

Examples of informal definitions of SI-units.

• 1 meter is choosen such that the equator has a length of 40.000 km
• 1 liter is a cubic decimeter
• 1 kilogramm is the mass of 1 liter of water (at 0 Degree Celsius)
• 1 Newton is the gravitation force acting on 100 gram
• 1 Watt second is the energy needed to lift 1 kilogram up 1 meter, it's also the energy generated by an electric current of 1 ampere over a potential difference of 1 Volt lasting for 1 second

Note: these definitions are correct with a precision of less than 1%, which is usually sufficient in every-day life.

To illustrate my point, I like the following example:

A pump with 1 horse power can lift 1 cubic feet of water 1 yard within 1 second. What is it's efficiency?

A 1 kilo-Watt pump can lift one liter of water 1 meter within 1 second. The efficiency is of course 1 percent.

There is a place for this. Jimp 07:07, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] English phonology

Smerdis of Tlön removes my request for a reference and replaces it with a dictionary citation. Many thanks, Ihcoyc. However, for some reason I still feel unsatisfied. Am I just hard to please? Does the dictionary really support the claim of the article. The article states the following.

The corresponding traditional units, though not all of Anglo-Saxon etymology, have been in use long enough to conform thoroughly to regular English phonology.

The dictionary of Smerdis of Tlön would seem to claim that

the word "pound" existed in English before 900 AD, and has cognates in Old Norse and Old High German. Likewise, the words "inch" and "ounce" are attested in English before 1000 AD.

Okay, that would be long enough but the obvious implication is that the names of metric units do not conform. Time for me to break out a dictionary. Behold the IPA transcription ... I won't bother to transcribe it but you can either take my word for it or click on the link to see that the the word breaks no phonotactic rules of English. If you're up for it, you might like to do the same for all metric units but is that necessary? Of course the names of metric units conform to English phonology. To claim otherwise is absurd. Jimp 08:22, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, you are hard to please. :) And no: at least some of the metric units do not conform to the ordinary rules of written English. The graphemes litre or liter look like they ought to rhyme with mitre and nitre, and ought to be pronounced the same as lighter. The representation of [iː] obviously is following an alien convention. English typically borrows foreign spellings along with foreign words that use the Latin alphabet, yielding a raft of irregularities: pizza, czar, lingerie and so forth. The unusual writing convention of the metric word likewise marks it as a foreignism. I have tried to reword that section to make it clearer that what happens is that the spelling is irregular and marks the word as being not native English. - Smerdis of Tlön 16:55, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Well done on the rewrite. It is a whole lot clearer ... more correct that way. After all what we really are talking about is not conforming to regular English phonology but conforming to regular English orthography. However, as far as I can make out, we're talking about the word litre/liter, which, yes, looks like it should be pronounced like lighter. I don't think the same can be said for other names of units ... Henry, Newton, Gray these look fine to me. As for the ~re endings as spelt outside of the U.S., this is pretty regular in Commonwealth English (albeit a Frenchification for the most part); then we've got acre which isn't aker in the U.S. So we have one word with its i plus magic e giving /iː/ like police ("borrowed" from Middle French in about 1530[1]) and machine (from Middle French 1549[2]). Jimp 00:36, 24 October 2006 (UTC)