Peanuts by Charles Schulz for November 16, 2018

you’ll be sorry, Franklin, for some fields of science require metric

It may not have become “official” here in the US, but we still have to deal with it…

It’s nice to see Franklin reappear.

I moved to Canada from the states 10 years ago. I still don’t really bother with the metric system. I have an idea of what Celcius temps are but I still find myself doubling the Celcius number and adding 32 (even that’s not an exact number).

If I remember correctly, we were heading towards metric under Jimmy Carter and stopped under Ronald Reagan. This strip would have been from the early 1970’s when Nixon or Ford was President.

And yet 40 years later the US refuses to join the rest of the world… ;) (As a Canadian growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, imperial measurements always confused me. But truth to be told most people I know still use feet/inches and pounds to measure their own height and weight—but for temperature, metric just makes so much more sense…)

They made learning the metric system impossibly hard in those days in the US. As elementary school kids we were expected to learn conversion tables etc. When I moved to Europe in the early 1980s, I figured out that a litre of milk is just shy of a quart, a metre is just over a yard, and a kilo of porkchops is “this many.” I liked the memnotics some of my older English friends learned: “A metre measures three foot three; it’s longer than a yard, you see. Two and a quarter pounds of jam weigh about a kilogramme.” And where I live, you know that when temps get above 36ºC, it’s too darn hot!!

About the only metrics understood in the US these days are 2 liters and 9 millimeter… :P

In the U.S., the metric system died, inch by inch.

They tried putting up metric speed limit signs in some parts of the states… people started shooting them down in response!

Dream on Patty. The US is still staunchly opposed to being in sync with the rest of the world on this matter.

It can be fun… I always tell people that I’m 1.8 meters tall and I weigh 1,100 newtons

My Dad had a mid-career change and became a sixth- and seventh-grade science teacher in about 1970. He said he had to relearn the metric system each year before teaching that unit.

My favorite “metric moment” was vacationing at Glacier National Park in Montana and taking a day trip into Alberta. Once you get past the crossing, the first thing you are greeted with is a black-and-white sign saying, Maximum 80. I cannot help but wonder how much money the RCMP makes in fines from Americans who take one look, think “COOL!” and floored the accelerator before realizing, “Oh, wait – kilometers per hour…”

All that money spent to convert the U.S. to metric, and all we got out of it was the two-liter bottle of soda… and those second sets of numbers on the speedometer.

Almost 50 years later and we still don’t use the metric system, and even though I learned it in school I don’t remember all the conversions now!

If we were using the metric system exclusively, they wouldn’t have to remember those conversion factors.

In Canada it is a mix, we know both, but if you Google it, OH I MEAN listen to the CBC, they did a show on this and found Canadians use the Metric system when trading internationally but use Imperial when talking personally.

It was being indoctrinated in schools and on TV (I remember seeing Public Service Announcements showing how the metric measurements translated to English back in the 70s), but unless you work on cars or work in a laboratory, metric is still a “foreign” measurement… although we still have the 2-liter bottle and measure automotive engine displacement in liters now…

That’s what I was told when I was in grade school over 50 years ago, still waiting and wishing we’d made the change.

I worked out a test for a team building exercise. One of the questions was 3 F in a Y. which means 3 FEET in a YARD. The test wouldn’t work in the metric system where it’s always 10 _ in a _

And yet here we are still using the imperial system.

I’ve been getting into woodworking lately. I find myself using the metric system because its so much easier to do the conversions.

The problem is that the metric system is taught here as a matter of converting. Almost 50 years ago, I had a great Earth Science teacher , Charles Donnelly, whose favorite way of dealing with that was to ask “How many centimeters are there in an inch?” His answer was “None, they’re two separate systems.” So, we just got used to dealing with the two side-by-side. Later in life, I called in artillery missions and air strikes using the metric system. As I’m still here to talks about it, Mr. Donnelly’s system must have worked.

If we had switched back then we would have 2 generations who knew only the metric system. Just one of the reasons our kids are behind in math and science.

The really ironic thing is that unit conversion is one of the most useless parts of “learning metric”. I don’t care about the equation to convert between Fahrenheit and Celsius. I know what temperatures are comfortable, hot, cold, freezing and boiling and I can just interpolate between them to understand what the rest is.

If a weatherman says the temperature is 37ºC, I don’t need to convert it to ºF in order to understand that it’s uncomfortably hot.

Ditto for the other various units.

But for some reason, every attempt to teach it in school involves unit conversion equations. Which are almost never used in real life (except when trying to explain something who only understands one of the two).

Every year in the ’60s, the science teacher would do a unit on the metric system while proclaiming how the U.S. was going to join the remainder of the world in using it. Sorry, Mrs. Peginoff….

It was even featured on the 1973 Peanuts special “There’s No Time For Love, Charlie Brown”.

They were saying that when I was in high school in Oklahoma in the 70s. If they’d actually started doing something about it then, instead of just talking about it, the US could have transitioned entirely to the metric system by now.

The reason it never caught on, was that they kept pushing converting the “new” measurements in Imperial which was as this strip shows, just impossible. In my old age I’m actually using Metric a lot more, especially in cooking and baking. Except for temperature. Saying it’s 14° and comfortable outside is just wrong.

My wife and I have this debate all the time. I keep asking her what would make more sense: a system of measurement where all you have to do is shift the decimal point, or something that was arbitrarily based on the length of some king’s nose?

I feel just like Franklin does.

I always measure and cut twice and it’s still too short! ;o{

Use one or the other.

The U.S. could have been finished making the metric conversion over 40 years ago, but didn’t. The same with the search for clean, renewable energy sources, which was a big topic in the 1970s but slowly fizzled out. The same mindset of arrogance and superiority continues to this day, and is getting worse as the country seems to be moving towards isolationism.

The U.S. was once a world leader, which meant cooperating with other nations, not bullying them.

I remember 55 years ago (in first grade) being told this. Still waiting. As far as I can see, the only thing we changed universally to metric are the 2 liter soda bottles. Not sure why we don’t join the rest of the world. And, besides, metric is “base 10”, not “base 12”.

She might need an update soon: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/king-of-kilograms-is-no-more-as-metric-system-gets-a-makeover/3009759.article

I think I agree with a sign I saw at an auction. “Keep liter in it’s place”. I think it was actually just a misspelling, but I like the sentiment.

I was a basketball PA announcer at my high school for a couple years in the mid-70’s. One game while introducing the starting lineups, I decided to announce players’ heights in meters, not feet/inches because (at the time) the country was going to convert to the metric system. It was weird announcing our starting center as “standing at 1.83 meters” instead of “standing at 6-feet, 7-inches” because it made him sound smaller. Only did it once, although I MAY try it once this winter at the local high school I’ll be announcing games for.

Nearly 50 years since this strip originally ran, and we still haven’t changed.

We still have the 2 liter bottle of soda!

Just change things to the whole numbers instead of using the direct length from inches to centimeters.

I’m 179 cm tall and my mass is 115 Kg.

Scientists in the US use metric. The trick is to not convert to the other system. The mechanic who uses both systems because some cars use “the other” system, never asks how many mm there are in a 3/8 inch bolt.

Actually, if we were to convert to metric, we would probably learn the weights and measures intuitively, rather than converting from one system to another. For example, a 3-liter bottle of water would weigh three Kilograms or a dollar bill is 15.24 cm. For Temperatures, yesterday’s Frazz has a memorable one. https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2018/11/15

The easiest way to learn the metric system is don’t try to convert it just use it. Zero is freezing and the boiling point of water 100, really people it’s not really that hard. Lengths or distance is 10 base. See Easy Peasy.

We got part way than gave up. Most bottles are sold as metric units (think wine, soda, and bottled water) and also engine sizes. My car doesn’t have a 350 cubic inch engine, it is a 5.7 litre (I’m rounding off here). My other car had a 2.0 litre.As someone else said, I don’t try to convert in my head, I just understand engines are rated that way and I can now visualize them.

I totally agree with the people who said that we should just start using it, and not converting it. No one (or very few) people like trying to do math in their heads, much like this strip is demonstrating. However, if you ask someone today to get a 2 liter bottle of soda, they will know how big the bottle is and get it. They don’t think “OK, two liters, that’s 0.528 gallons, so I’ll look for the bottle that’s a little more than half of a gallon jug in size”.

Unfortunately, until those of us who had to live through that conversion boondoggle either die off or forget, the US will remain non-metric. BTW, Liberia and Myanmar are the only other places in the world that do not officially use the metric system.

Not if we can help it. True, we don’t take to force as many continually fail to learn. Also true many potential benefits exist. Decades ago, some thinking themselves powerful enough thought to replace the Arabic number system with the Roman system. That didn’t work either. One based more or less on standard development of body parts and material need in volume in use for more than 1000 years. The other more recently created by an American engineer and adopted by our military. An easier numeral system standard while the remainder of it more or less randomly chosen. One is totally ingrained in us because we reach very far back.

We now again have some encouraging us to also look far ahead.

Thank God we in India are already into metric system. The fps system looks scary. But most of the good technical books are still in fps, and we are used to conversion methodology!

I lived in Asia for more than a decade… Everything was in metric, and I caught on pretty quick. We know what 3 liters of pop is in the states, because they sell it in 3 liter bottles. If they started selling things in metric terms, we’d learn quickly. In the end, I think, what does it matter whether I calculate my weekend trip in miles or kilometers? Really, none.

Good answer