Dear Paul,
It's good to hear from a fresh voice here! You bring an interesting
perspective to this group, with your background and fairly recent
approach to the metric system. I will give you my background to compare
to yours. That will show how my wife and I progressed to daily use of
metric units and how we adopted our favorite units.
I have used the metric system professionally (at work) for a few
decades. But I did not start using it personally (at home) until the
late '80s. When I did start using it in my everyday life, I found that
it was a vast improvement to use it in my woodworking and cooking.
Metric rulers are generally gradated in millimeters while "normal"
rulers are gradated in sixteenths of an inch (larger than a millimeter).
By using millimeters for marking precision cuts, my wood joints fit
better. But I found that centimeters worked best overall layout and
sizing a piece of furniture to a room, for instance. Fortunately, I can
multiply and divide by 10 in my head. (Factors of 16 are a lot tougher!)
In college I had done quantity cooking (~1300 plates in a meal) and so I
had some background in measuring recipe ingredients by mass, rather than
by volume. I grew fond of baking (one of the cooking stations I occupied
for a year). I found at home in later years that bread recipes (and
others) were more reproducible in their outcomes if I weighed
ingredients, so my wife (who had a similar background) and I started
weighing recipe ingredients at home. Metric units were a "natural" for
that; they were easier to use when scaling recipes. My wife was a
Registered Dietitian and had a copy of USDA's Handbook 8 that gave
masses (in grams) for many foodstuffs and she was used to weighing food
in grams. So we started metricating our favorite recipes. Of course,
relating grams to kilograms was a snap. And, with water (and, close
enough, milk) having a mass pretty darned close to 1 kg/L, many
conversions could be done in our heads.
In the late '90s I earned a Master's in Environmental Studies and did a
thesis project on a meteorological phenomenon (sea breezes). I set out
three remote weather stations and used their data with NWS data to do my
research and write my thesis. So, my maritime experience in weather (I
retired from the U.S. Navy in 1990) became "metricated".
At the start of 2007 I retired as an educator (high school and college,
mostly teaching physics) and moved to the farm in Tennessee that my wife
had grown up on. For two years I worked on the beginnings of a new
farmstead on the land which had come to us. As much as possible, I used
metric units to lay out things in that farmstead (cabin, gardens, shed
placement, orchard trees, etc.) and set up a Davis Vantage Pro2 wireless
weather station, which I run in metric units. Two years later, our house
in South Carolina had sold, my wife retired and moved up here, and we
spent the next year (2009) designing a house and having it built. My
wife was used to using metric units (milliliters and grams, mostly) in
the kitchen, but she had to acquire a "metric feel" for meters and
weather parameters -- mostly because that was all that I would use
myself. We bought a GPS for our travels and set it up in metric units.
"Chatty Cathy" tells us how far ahead our turns are in meters or
kilometers and usually we can see those turns up ahead. With that and
gardening, my wife has migrated to using meters in everyday conversation
about things ("That Tom turkey I saw on the farmlane was only 30 m
away!"). She and I often use such metric units in our conversations with
friends and business people around here and only rarely do they ask for
clarification. Some may understand us and some may just be deciding to
hide their lack of familiarity, but that's their choice to make. If they
ask, we gladly clarify to help them understand.
So, that's our experience. We just started using the metric system for
everything we could except when forced not to. For example, our house
builder is non-metric and so were his crew members. To insist on metric
there probably would have raised the cost of our house considerably to
pay for the time it took them to come up to speed on the system and its
use. In our daily use, it just became obvious to us as to which
particular prefixed units to use. We did what was easiest, regardless of
pronouncements by others favoring one over the other.
On your other topic: no, fractions are not used in writing metric
values. In casual speech, it's common to speak of "half a liter", but
that would be written as 0.5 L or as 500 mL.
Paul, I hope that long-winded rambling above was helpful to you. It's
good to have you aboard and I hope to hear from you periodically!
Jim
On 2011-04-01 1132, Paul Rittman wrote:
I have been looking at the metric system for a couple of years now. My
primary reason for exploring it has been my continual frustration with
the bizarre medley of traditional imperial units—bushels, hogheads,
hundredweights, etc., as well as the various types of ounces. I teach
history at the college level and struggle to be able to remember
statistics because they are usually attached to some unit that I can’t
seem to recall off the top of my head.
First, I have seen many people in threads (not here) state that they
like using the metric on the job, but at home and in their personal
lives, they prefer the traditional units. I think it is best for society
to pick one system and use it (almost) exclusively, instead of switching
between two separate systems—and I’m sure some NASA engineers would
agree with me there.
My main problem with the metric system is trying to use it in my daily
life (I live in the southern California region in the United States).I
don’t really have a problem with kilometers or liters, but with the
shorter units of length that I would be using in my daily life. I guess
its easier to visualize 6 feet than 180 or so centimeters. I read Pat’s
article on using the millimeter (perhaps he was simply saying that
businesses should use mm, with individuals using what they prefer?), but
it just seemed a bit too much to continually tell myself, “I’m sitting
150 mm from the window,” or something like that, or that I’m 18,500 mm
tall.
Even cm seem to small, but decimeters seemed good—about the width of my
hand. But then I looked around and saw that pretty much nothing was
measured in terms of the decimeter (except pools in metric countries).
Any suggestions on ingraining the metric system in your personal life?
This isn’t the only question I have, but it’s the most significant.
Honestly, I think I’d rather speak in terms of “I’m a third of a meter
away from the window” than any other metric way of speaking—a meter is
pretty easy for me to visualize, as are simple fractions like that—but I
keep getting the idea that one isn’t supposed to use fractions in the
metric system. Or is this simply in a professional setting, where
calculations need to be used?
I’ll save my next question for a future thread, after we solve this one. J
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
