Stories I tell my students: metric system joke

[darksumomo]

This week, I ran the metric system lab in my Environmental Science class. It replaced the microscope lab that was there when I got the job for two reasons, one positive and one negative (after reading, you decide which reason is which). First, I eliminated all the activities that used the microscopes because they involved harming animals (they

Comments

[wombat_socho]

Sad but true.

[darksumomo]

Yes, but the line gets both an "AHA" response and a laugh.

[darksumomo]

*Snort* Fake News for the win.

[meggypeggy1]

True dat.

[darksumomo]

Which is exactly why I tell the joke and run the lab.

[ajat]

I have never been able to make myself accept the use of animal-models. It can be a bit of a problem sometimes ... But it gives me the creeps.

Metric system in US ? :D :D Have fun teaching it :D

[nightingale0]

But it's so much easier than the old system! They switched here when I was young, and I never understood why so many people complained about it - there is really only a problem if you insist on constantly translating between the two. Many companies use stupid package and bottle sizes, so we have all sorts of odd sizes, for example drinks from one company coming in 250 ml, 500 ml, 1 & 2 l, and from another company in sizes like 355 ml, 456 ml, and 1.36 l, which makes comparison shopping harder than it needs to be.

[ajat]

You mean 'switched' to metric system ?

I have grown up on kilograms and kilometres and centigrade, so the pounds and miles and fahrenheit make me all annoyed when I have to be in them :/ Its easy to calculate through 10-s rather than other divisions for me ...

[dglenn]

I'm an American who likes the Metric system. So yeah, I'm converting a lot. Therefore it's a problem. If the rest of my country would catch up, it'd stop being a problem.

Note that it's not just the annoyance of converting that's a problem, nor even the odd sizes of food packaging. Half our nuts and bolts are Metric, so we need twice as many spanners as everyone else. (I used to drive a car on which half the bolts on that car were Metric and the other half weren't. I needed two complete sets of sockets for my socket wrench just to work on one car.) And some of the sizes are close enough to invite head-stripping or cross-threading mistakes.

I'm personally more familiar with Metric for some combination of thing-measured and scale (meters, mm, μm, cc, cal (and Cal/kcal), grams) and the American system for others (feet, miles, pounds, tons, quarter-inches), and on roughly equal footing in a few ranges (whole inches, cm; liters, quarts, gal; °F, K[*]). It's a pretty messed-up state, both personally and culturally. I keep

[sabotabby]

Here via dglenn. I'm in Canada so all of our students are supposed to know metric. The only ones who know how to use imperial are the foreign-born students, the tech students (in theory; in practice they can't do math at all), and the drug dealers.