Testify!

I can VAGUELY help you with the temperature question, since 0 degrees Celsius is freezing and that means that 20 degrees is well above freezing. More than that? Who knows?

I just remember R2D2 was a meter tall and Darth Vader was 2 meters and then I can extrapolate.

Anyway yeah apparently most utopian futures have all vestiges of English weights and measures cast aside.

My quick conversions:

1 meter = 1 yard
1 litre = 1 quart
3 kilometers = 2 miles
30 Celcius is a nice summer day with a cool breeze (86 F).
40,000 kilometers is the circumference of the earth.
If it starts talking about mega- tera- peta- anything, it is big.
If it starts talking about milli- micro- nano- anything, it is small.

I've seen it alot in even old sci-fi like Heinlein.
Being ex-military I can think distances in klicks, (km = .6 miles, 1.6 km = 1 mile) but other stuff is difficult.
1 meter is actually 1.1 yards, hence 440 yds = 400 meters (also ran track). 12 millimeters is an inch, roughly, so a 120 mm main tank gun is approx 10 inches.
A kilo is about 2.2 lbs.
Body temp is 37 degrees centigrade/ 98 fahrenheit.

Being a rightwingIMMIGRANT from a metric backward country and a geek, yes, I can vizualise in both metric and british/yank system.
/bragging

1 inch = 2.54 cm
1 ft = 12 inches = 30.48 cm = 0.3048 m
1 lbs = 454 gm = 0.454 kg
1 kg = 2.2 lbs

20 C is room temperature. It's a little cooler than American room temperature, but that's because European people suck.

All I know is I weigh 10 stone 4 pounds, and I am nearly a fathom tall. I run a league a day and it's about eight furlongs to my house from my office to my house, which is about 40 cubits long. See you in a fortnight.

There a few novels that employ systems based on natural constants. I believe Donald Kingsbury's Psycho-Historical Crisis is one of these.

Here's Leonard Cottrell's wonderful set of "Post-metric Fables: stories told in human-scale natural units". The fables have titles like "The Rumpus-to-weight Ratio", "The Rush of Sunlight", "The String of Perfect Lightness", and "The Auspiciousness of Miles".

The set of units he uses are described in the Preface:
"There is a set of units built into nature—based on proportions intrinsic to light and gravity—called the natural units or Planck units. Human-scale versions of the natural units are fun to play around with and convenient to use for some purposes."

Units have names like talent, oc, pony, chi, bone, and pace. Many of these names have classical origins.

This guy has a physicist's intuition and a poet's tongue. Well worth some reading time.

Hi, Just wanted to say that I am a big fan of Michael Z. Williamson, if you like the Weapon you will probably like Freehold, same setting etc. I too, found the use of metrics somewhat annoying,it seems like the only fly in the ointment of a utopia like the Grianne Freehold! Congrats on your recent marriage, best wishes and all that.

I remember that Midnight Oil song:
"a steaming forty-five degrees..."

That's hot.

As someone else pointed out 0 is freezing.

20 is something in between.

Problem solved.

I've always had problems with metric because its not based on real world things. And two more reasons not to like it:

1. It came from France

2. It came from France at a time when France was rebelling against God.

(And it that's not enough for ya, look up how the meter is offically defined.)

Hey, all the good sci-fi is using metric! Look at any of the good crop of Baen authors...

Why? Simple: what do people that actually need precision use (like scientists and the military)? Metric. Trust me, I cling to my good old inches, pounds, and miles, but the English system sucks when making calculations and conversions. Metric is easy-peasy base 10 stuff. As for why in sci-fi? 'Cause anyone dealing with stellar distances and c-fractional speeds HAS to be using metric or some unknown-yet-easy-to-use system. How the heck could you have a missile engagement taking place across light-minutes of space using crappy conventions like mph? Read some David Weber, dude.

20 degrees Celsius = 68 degrees Farenheit

I am familiar with metrics for two reasons.
1-having to work with "multinational forces" in iraq
2-metrics is replacing feet/inches in most science classes as the standard of measurement. And since most SF writers are versed in science, this sort of creeps into their books.

Honestly, it is far and a away the best system.

"Lesse-1/4 inch plus 2/3 inch plus 15/18 inch= fucking please just shoot me now."

Takes a little getting used to, but it is worth the effort. Much, much easier to work with a system that revolves around primes of 10.

Even if it was invented by cheese-eating surrender monkeys who hate God.

Temp in F = ((Temp in C) * (9/5)) + 32

C'mon, can't you do the calculation in your head? How the mighty have fallen....

how are you getting a 120mm smoothbore at 10 inches???

when you do a borescope and pullover on a 105mm (M60A1), you're looking for a reading of +/- 4.134 inches....

maybe those extra 15mm must be on some other scale.

[degrees C times 9 divided by 5] + 32
20C=68F

I use metrics to, it's just for non-scientific things (i.e., casually saying a person's height and weight) it seems out of place to me.

MajMike - he got his inch to cm wrong.
1 in. = 2.54 cm.

Of course, metrics may have their uses in confusing the moonbats on gun control - "It's not a .50 caliber, its a 12.5mm."

temperature is easy.

0-10C is cold
10C-20C is medium
20C-30C is warm
30C-40C is hot
40C+ is just stupid

P.S. As a New Zealander we don't get extremes, you all probably are soft and think that 10-20C is cold, and might want to adjust up...

You can include Princess Leia into that estimation at 1.5m, as that's roughly about as short a human gets.

Zordran:

WOW. I pity your women. Childbirth must be horrific.

The military likes to use metric measurements. And you can't tell me that there's anything more American than Marines picking off terrorists from 500 meters away while the artillery battery pounds away at the rest of the terrorists from 30 klicks. Oorah.

Hi, I'm not going to talk about Metric verses standard, I want to talk about the Weapon and its precursor Freehold. You really need to read Frehold first to get a feel for what the Weapon is all about. I could post many spoilers but why ruin it? I enjoyed both books and I think you will too.

(One small spoiler)
Punk walks into gunshop on Graine. He is from a UN controlled Earth. Sees all the guns available and can't believe his luck. Owner asks if he is interested in anything. Punk picks one up and shoots the owner. Owner goes down and punk runs into street. Punk is shot so many times it looks like he made the First Marine Division mad at him.

Owner counts his blessings for wearing a bullet proof vest in case of accidents and chides the recently deceased punk on choosing solid ammo over explosive rounds.

(Ok, two small spoilers to Freehold)
I really liked one of the characters talking about building and using a nuke as a high school project. :)

For everyone: you can read Freehold (and many other books) for free in the Baen Free Library area!

http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

Assuming I didn't make any dumb math mistakes (and I haven't done math for two years). 20 Celsius is 68 Fahrenheit. Zero Celsius is 32 Fahrenheit, and 100 Celsius is 212 Fahrenheit (the freezing and boiling points of water) That means 100 degrees celsius is equal to 180 degrees Fahrenheit...which I think means that to convert them you multiply the celsius by 1.8 and then add 32.

Come on, metric units are way better. Speaking of getting calculators, who wants to get out a calculator and remember conversion factors when doing simple things like figuring out pressure?

With metric, you don't worry about conversion factors, everything just multiplies to give you the right units.

Oh, and a "steaming forty-five degrees" is damned hot. That's 113 degrees farenheit. In Australia we sometimes get that in the outback, but rarely get above about 42 in big cities (on the coast)

I once read (or tried to read) an SF story where the common units of time were things like Kiloseconds and Megaseconds. I can't remember the title of the story, but if you want to talk about hard to visualize, you can't get much worse than that.

Iain M. Banks's Culture novels measure speed in kilolights. That's cool.

all i know is a 5k is 3.1 miles and a 10k is 6.2 miles and a marathon is 26.2 miles...and they all hurt. specially the marathon.

What? What? "Honestly, it is far and a away the best system?"

No, I can't take it too seriously ... funny how fightin' the good fight once on a blog will make you start fightin the good fight all damn day :)

Besides, it's not like it took 5 Kiloyears to create, balance, and tune the last measuring system. Oh wait--it did.

... always thought it was strange the Hitchhiker's Guide used English Customary. Grateful, but ... confused.

I use the BTU for temperatures (BDU Thermal Units):

1. Wear standard issues BDUs (and regulation undergarments, perverts)

2. Go outside.

3. If you shiver, its "F*ckin' cold". If you sweat, it's "F*ckin' hot".

4. Honestly, what more do you need?

---

Weber's Honor Harrington series makes a very good point about the problems of time measurement on various planets with radically different rotational/revolution periods (ie, some places might juggle as many as 3 calendars). He also makes the point that future colonist may wind up measuring things in a common "T-year".

I always wondered what time zone the ships on Star Trek linked their clocks to. Do they still use Zulu or what?

Something else to consider. Will we be setting up new "zero year" points every so often for stating the current year. If not, things could get really unwieldy in about 7,993 (T)years.

Yeah, In my job I have to get a 21-ton backhoe within 1/16 of an inch, the newb employee tried to tell me metric and I nearly whscked him with the shovel arm...big ouch...

...don't try to tell me metric, I get confused easily

P.S. I think I was less confused before reading the comments ;-P

What I find annoying is the spurious accuracy claimed by the metric partisans. These are the same twits who'll tell me it's 11:29 pm when all I really want to know is that it's "about half past".

Canada, which is officially metric, unofficially uses a combination of both systems. When referencing long distances and liquids the metric system is used because road signs and gas/milk are listed in it. But when it comes to height and weight people still use pounds and feet because scales and measuring tapes have both listed and I guess they stuck with what they know.

I remember when they tried to change the speed limit signs to metric and people shot the hell out of the signs. I agree that the scientists should use what works best for them, but I also agree with civil disobedience when the mucky mucks try to make us use metric in our daily lives. One of these days I have got to buy a gun.

Thanks for the info on the Williamson stories, I'm going to go buy 'em now. I believe in gun rights because of a sci fi story I read when I was a young teen. One of these days I hope I stumble across it again.

I agree with you Frank. Metric measurements in a story feel unintuitive and exclusionary, like any other kind of jargon (to the uninitiated, and who are these guys writing for, anyway? Themselves? Fine, I'll go read something else then).

I used milliliters and centimeters all through school science classes, and it makes sense in that context, but if I come across things like you mentioned while reading a book, I skip over it: information not conveyed.

It's the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars -- one is a special little universe for nerds to pick apart; the other is a story, meant for a wide and timeless audience.

I'd guess that the traditional measurements in the Hitchhikers books weren't an accident.

Yeah, make your bad guys use metric. :)

Well, there are some insidious lies out there regarding weapon calibres.

The bad-ass .357 Sig round is actually not exactly .357, it happens to be just a tad less than that, .355 or somesuch...in any case exactly the 9mm parabellum. What Sig did is sort of neck down a .40 casing to 9mm, BUT choose to call it ".357" so as to avoid the wussitude stinkum of "9mm" in favor of the hand-cannon reputation of the old .357 Magnum. The truth, the bullets mounted to that high-pressure necked down .40 cal cartridge are standard 9mm parabellum, albeit with 50% more kinetic energy.

What I'm looking for in a Sci-Fi book is a warp bullet that just after impact establishes a brief wormhole to the core of the sun, or a blackhole, or wherever so it either turns a sherical chunk of the target into hot plasma or sucks it in. The cartridge should be .45 ACP, cause that's what Team America would use.

The metric system is the tool of the devil. My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!

If I'm doing a scale drawing, and I need to divide a line into three equal parts, it's easy with the American system - a foot-long line divides nicely into three 4-inch segments. Try that with some fancy base-10 measurement.

I think that the frogs developed the base ten system specifically so they can't divide evenly by three, so as to deny the Trinity, those G-dless heathens.