Category Archives: International Standards

My Olde English GPS Adventure

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Don’t look in the trunk, it’s imperial in there

By The Metric Maven

Bulldog “Moon Landing” Edition

When I finally purchased a GPS for my automobile, the impact it had on how I drove around my city was enormous. I also immediately set it for kilometers instead of miles. Within a few weeks I had a good idea how far 100, 200 and 500 meters is and about how far I could see was often about a kilometer. For the next few years I merrily drove multi-state road trips and local ones with the GPS piloting my excursions.

My father did not own a GPS at the time I purchased mine and was curious. At his request I brought it with us on an errand and we set it to find the address where an old family friend had lived at a nearby lake. It immediately told us to proceed 200 meters to a nearby stoplight. My father’s face contorted, and some very disapproving prose was uttered. I don’t recall what he said, but I do recall laughing out loud. Despite my father being “metrically challenged” the test trip went smoothly and we arrived at our destination.

Because I had not estimated drive times in metric before, I had to adapt. A useful benchmark in Ye Olde English is 60 miles per hour or a mile per minute. 40 miles is about 40 minutes. If I saw a road sign which stated it was 270 miles to a destination, I would have to multiply out integer values of 60 and figure the remainder. “Let’s see 240 miles is four hours and 30 left over is 30 more minutes. so four and one half hours.” I immediately realized I had lost the mile per minute guesstimate in metric, but hours were instantaneous to determine. A good guesstimate of an average speed is 100 Km/h Kph . So let’s suppose a kilometer marker states it’s 450 Km* to a destination, immediately we know it’s 4.5 hours. For short trips I know that 0.1 hour is six minutes. If it’s 10 Km to a destination it’s about six minutes, 25 Km is 15 minutes, 50 is 30 minutes and 75 is 45 minutes.

I happily continued my GPS guided metric motoring over the last few years without incident. Then, this last winter I had a disruption. It had been hovering about zero degrees Fahrenheit or about -18 Celsius outside. I went to my car and drove to a battery store on a side of town with which I’m unfamiliar but was straightforward to find. I needed to go to a market next, and wanted to take the most direct route. I fired up my GPS. There was just one problem, it had been so cold the battery went dead and reset the unit. I had to tell the unit I was in the US and other information. I could not find my stored addresses. I tried cycling the power. All my saved addresses re-appeared!  Great! I selected the market and began driving. The GPS display indicated I needed to drive 7 Km and make a right turn onto an interstate highway. I thought to myself “that’s not too far.” It seemed like it took quite a while to cover the 7 Km, but I took no real notice. When the turnoff onto an interstate highway arrived, the voice instructed me to “turn right in 0.4 miles.” Suddenly I had no idea how far that was. Even though I could see the turnoff, it bothered me I had no correlation with distance. As I entered the highway I was told to drive 7 miles. When I approached the off ramp to the secondary street leading to the market it again gave the distance in tenths of miles. They had no meaning for me.

I was completely familiar with this road and the turnoffs in metric, but the correlation with the Olde English distances on my GPS were giving me a sort of unexpected vertigo. As I approached the market I looked up at the distance display and all I could read was 600. I was so used to seeing meters there that my mind rejected what it was seeing. I thought it can’t be yards, they’re like meters, it must be feet. When I pulled into the parking lot I could barely read a tiny ft stacked up on the GPS units after the number. But it had been tenths of miles previously when I was turning. When did the units switch?

Driving with my GPS set to kilometers caused me to pay little attention to the distances on signs. Without metric for a touchstone, the craziness of US road signs became stark. I noticed this sign which indicates the left lane will end in 1/2 mile. You will note there is a second follow-up warning sign, which can be seen along with the first but not read:

This Lane Ends 1/2 Mile (note second warning sign in the distance)

Here is the second warning sign in the distance:

This Lane Ends in 1000 feet

The first sign tells me that the left lane ends in 1/2 mile or 5280 feet/2 which is 2640 feet. The second sign, whose presence is clearly seen from the first, next tells us the left lane ends in 1000 feet, which is of course 1000 ft/5280 ft/mile or 0.19 miles approximately.  Wow! How had I not noticed this crazy set of signs before?—oh—I was using metric with my GPS and ignoring them. If they had been in metric the first sign might have said:  This Lane Ends in 800 meters, the second sign could then say This Lane Ends In  300 meters. This is much easier to read than 0.8 Km and 0.3 Km. Nice Naughtin friendly integers, and the same units for both signs.

One never hears cries of the “implied precision fallacy” when feet are used in a context like this. In this case the first sign is in miles, the second is in feet. This is a ratio of 1:5280. Where are the cries that feet are too small of a unit?—they imply too much precision for this usage—or that miles are too large?  In the case of kilometers and meters, the ratio is only 1:1000.

When I returned from shopping, I set my GPS unit back to kilometers. As soon as I heard proceed 500 meters and take a left, I was calm again. As I drove home I noticed something else. I had not been  looking at the distances on the road signs as my GPS provided distances to exits in metric. Apparently, when I was looking at the signs, I had been just noticing the road name and the exit numbers. With the interruption of my GPS unit still firmly in my mind, I realized that the road signs all had fractional distances. Harlan street 3/4 mile, or Jessman Drive 1/2 mile, yet the GPS would output decimal miles—-0.75 miles or 0.5 miles—-it did not match the fractional expression on the signs. This was but one more reminder that we have not even fully embraced decimals in this country, let alone the metric system. No wonder it seemed so odd.

Once I used a GPS with metric measurement, I embraced a system which has a dimensional continuum. I understood meters, and if I was told it was 1000 meters to a destination (which it has) or  alternatively 1 kilometer, this created no distance discontinuity in my mind. They both cognitively registered as the same distance without distraction. Metric forms a continuous expression of sizes. When using Ye Olde English/USC/ACSOWM one may choose whatever unit you feel like, in fact we are encouraged to do this by our grade school pedants, but this farrago of units creates discontinuities in cognitive quantity comprehension. The sudden change from tenths of miles to hundreds of feet was a jolt. I was so happy I had my meters back.  Olde English has hundreds of units from which one can choose. A false maxim of The Ye Olde English Arbitrary Grouping of Weights and Measures, is to choose a unit that fits the closest to what you’re measuring. This multi-card measurement monte encouraged massive unit proliferation, which in turn allows massive opportunities for fraud and confusion.

The metric system has but one base unit for length, the meter. The prefixes describe units which are multiplied or divided by 1000. The length of an object falls on the metric measurement continuum. If its length is near a prefix boundary, Naughtin’s Laws help to keep one’s intuition of magnitude continuous by smoothing out discontinuities. (This is also a reason I’m against the use of centimeters, and believe they should be discontinued for actual computation)

I had an unexpected realization from my GPS reset. Suppose you were from another country—ok any other country sans Liberia and Myanmar, and visited the US. You have been brought up on the metric system, and suddenly you are confronted with US roadsigns. You first must contend with miles, and signs with fractions of miles, not decimals. Then  you suddenly encounter a sign that says: Right lane ends 500 feet. We switched units on you from miles to feet, and possibly even yards. You have no idea if that is near or far as the base unit of length has been changed–radically. One can see how this switching of units could cause panic, measurement vertigo, and uncertainty for a visiting driver. I had somewhat experienced their possible confusion when my GPS reset itself to Ye Olde English—and I grew up in this country.

Unfortunately our provincial culture does not seem to allow us to understand the potential confusion our jumble of units could cause a visitor from another country. The few who do try to accommodate visitors find it tough going. In 1982 the state of Florida decided to add metric units to its highway signs. The rationale behind this change was that over five million tourists visited Florida and many of them were unfamiliar with Olde English units. They also believed it would encourage Americans to become more familiar with metric units. Florida was going to use its own funds to implement this change. There was only one thing they needed, the approval of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

It came as a surprise, when, despite the 1866 federal law which does not allow the prohibition of metric units in the US, the FHWA refused to allow the signs. They argued that Congress had passed a law which prohibited the installation of solely metric highway signs using Federal funds, unless Congress approved. The installation of these signs would violate neither of those conditions. The FHWA would later reverse itself without providing rational reasons for the attempted ban, or why it changed its stand. Like most tales of metric in the US, a later Florida Governor would refuse to allow the signs to be installed.

After my experience losing metric in my GPS, I can truly say to visitors to this country who must drive our roads, I feel your pain.

* Yes I’m using capital K deliberately.

If you liked this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page and contribute. Also purchase his books about the metric system:

The first book is titled: Our Crumbling Invisible Infrastructure. It is a succinct set of essays  that explain why the absence of the metric system in the US is detrimental to our personal heath and our economy. These essays are separately available for free on my website,  but the book has them all in one place in print. The book may be purchased from Amazon here.


The second book is titled The Dimensions of the Cosmos. It takes the metric prefixes from yotta to Yocto and uses each metric prefix to describe a metric world. The book has a considerable number of color images to compliment the prose. It has been receiving good reviews. I think would be a great reference for US science teachers. It has a considerable number of scientific factoids and anecdotes that I believe would be of considerable educational use. It is available from Amazon here.


The third book is called Death By A Thousand Cuts, A Secret History of the Metric System in The United States. This monograph explains how we have been unable to legally deal with weights and measures in the United States from George Washington, to our current day. This book is also available on Amazon here.

The Story of Measurement

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The Story of Measurement by Andrew Robinson

By The Metric Maven

The book The Story of Measurement by Andrew Robinson is a magnificent work of graphic arts. Page after page of eye catching color graphics assault the senses. The illustrations are just candy for the eyes. It is a truly magnificent “coffee table book.”  In the introduction the author impresses upon the reader how prevalent measurement is in our everyday lives:

A few minutes’ reflection reminds us that measurement pervades our everyday lives. In no particular order, we constantly encounter: clocks, calendars, rulers, cloth sizes, floor areas, cooking recipes, sell-by-dates, alcohol content, match scores, musical notation, map scales, internet protocols, word counts, memory chips, bank accounts, financial indexes, radio frequencies, calculators, speedometers, spring balances, electricity meters, cameras, thermometers, rainfall gauges, barometers, medical examinations, drug prescriptions, body mass indexes, educational tests, opinion polls, focus groups, questionnaires, consumer surveys, tax returns, censuses and many other forms of measurement — all of which serve to reduce the world to numbers and statistics.” (Page 7)

One can imagine my anticipation when I read that paragraph. One could only believe a good read was to follow. What would he have to say about the metric system?  We don’t have to wait long, on page 13 he states: “But the acute economic difficulties experienced with the new [metric] system persuaded Napoleon to rescind the original legislation in 1812.” Author Andrew Robinson indicates that only scientists were upset at this reversal. This statement seemed at odds with what I understood to have occurred historically in France. I made a mental note to look into it.

Robinson then indicates that Thomas Young (1773-1829) did not support “the legislative enactment of uniform weights and measures in Britain.” Young had written an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1823 and the author quotes from it. Young sees France’s experiment with creating a single measure as a failure and argued that:

…the British government should ‘endeavor to facilitate both the attainment of correct and uniform standards of legal existing measures of all kinds, and the ready understanding of all the provincial and local terms applied to measures, either regular or irregular, by the multiplication of glossaries and tables for the correct definition and of such terms.’

The more measurement units, the merrier!? Then it hit me. Thomas Young. I’d tried to read the book The Last Man Who Knew Everything two times and found it completely unable to engage my enthusiasm. It is about the life of Thomas Young. I went to my bookshelf and located it. The book was written by, you guessed it, Andrew Robinson. This was not a good portent, but I tried to be optimistic. Then I read this:

In the telling words of the economic historian Witold Kula in Measures and Men: `The reform that standardized weights and measures, which had been so ardently desired for centuries and so widely demanded by the common people on the eve of the Revolution, extolled by so many of the truest revolutionaries and conceived by the finest scientific minds of the day, had, ultimately, to be imposed upon the people.’

Economic historian? Does it disturb the economic historian that currencies are imposed on the public? Should we therefore we should go back to barter? Robinson introduces an economic historian as an indirect backdoor way of introducing an old canard, market Darwinism, as an argument against the metric system without actually straightforwardly stating it. Later, on page 81, Robinson goes further:

Even scientists sometimes take refuge in non-standard units, more ‘human’ than, say, gigametres (109 m) and nanometres (10-9 m). Astronomers like the ‘astronomical unit’ (AU), equaling the mean distance between Sun and Earth; from the Sun to Jupiter is 5.20 AU, a figure easier  to remember than the metric distance, 778 gigametres. Chemists are fond of the angstrom (Å), 0.1 nanometer, for measuring molecular distances; the radius of the chlorine molecule is about 1 (Å).

Oh the humanity!—of unfettered unit proliferation!? I recommend that Robinson read my essay Long Distance Voyager. There he will see evidence of the great utility the metric system has for describing astronomical distances. The angstrom is an exclusionary unit, which acts as a barrier to an integrated understanding of sizes at the nanometer level.

Along the way Robinson offers up this about the metric system:

Among the US public, Gallup polls showed that between 1971 and 1991, awareness of the metric system increased from 38 to 80 percent, but the proportion of those favoring its adoption fell from 50 to 26 percent. (page 31)

One should note that he uses the word awareness, which does not imply they understand the metric system. I’m more aware of Cricket after working with English and Indian engineers, but I can clearly claim I do not understand it and probably would be less inclined to favor playing it.

Robinson also has an incredible fetish for fractions and milliSaganistic prose (i.e. millions and millionths). On page 84 he discusses the 19th century mystery of how and why pollen grains vibrated in water, which is called Brownian motion:

From theory, Einstein calculated that particles in water at 17 degrees C with a diameter of a thousandth of a millimetre — that is, 10,000 times bigger than atoms — should move a mean horizontal distance of 6 thousandths of a millimetre in one minute.

I’ll take a stab at editing this set of prose using metric prefixes:

From theory, Einstein calculated that one micrometer sized particles of pollen, in water at 17 degrees C, would move a mean horizontal distance of six micrometers in one minute, in response to being jostled by picometer sized atoms of water, which are 10 000 times smaller than the pollen particles.

Robinson made me pine for the excellent monograph Science & Music by Sir James Jeans when I read:

….and the amplitude [of a sound wave] dictates the sound pressure. At the threshold of hearing, the displacement is a mere millionth of a millionth of a metre (about one fifth of the radius of a hydrogen atom!).

Perhaps?:

“….and the [perceived] amplitude dictates the sound pressure. At the threshold of hearing, the displacement is a mere picometre (about one fifth of the radius of a hydrogen atom!).”

Robinson continues:

and the pressure difference between the peak and the trough of the wave is a two hundredth of a thousandth of a pascal (compare normal atmospheric pressure, which is about 100,000 Pa).

Possibly?:

and the pressure difference between the peak and the trough of the wave is 5 micropascals (compare normal atmospheric pressure, which is about 100  kilopascals or 20 000 000 000 times larger).

One would hope that’s enough zeros for histrionics’ sake!

An example of Robinson’s fetish for fractions is shown in his caption of a photograph which shows Physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) viewing a tiny electric motor. The motor was engineered in response to a famous technical challenge he made:

Perhaps 750 microwatts of power from a motor which is 4.25 micrometers in diameter? After all how many people own a horse these days?

In Robinson’s section on screws he only mentions Joseph Whitworth, and passes over metric screws completely. When discussing calorie counting he mentions kilojoules only once, essentially as a token conversion factor.

It is a strange book on the story of measurement which has so little of the metric system or its usage in it, but that is what The Story of Measurement is. Now and then, despite his sprinkling of unnecessary centimeters—ok—I’m of the opinion that all centimeters are unnecessary, he uses mm in a way with large decimals that comports with my understanding of accepted metric usage:

The zeros are separated with spaces by three. He uses millimeters. It gives an idea the value is getting smaller—a lot smaller. This is a nice table in a book which is dominated by large fractions and mixed usage. This table is fine, and might be the best presentation, but an alternative way he could have constructed the table might have been using picometers with the whole number rule:

1791  Quarter meridian of of Earth  +/-  60 000 000 pm
1889  Prototype bar                          +/-    2 000 000 pm
1960  Krypton Wavelength                +/-           7000 pm
1983  Speed of Light                         +/-             700 pm
Today Improved Laser                       +/-               20 pm

Unfortunately good examples of metric usage, like his table, are few and far between in this book. There even seems to be a ubiquitous underlying hostility to metric usage just barely below the surface of this narrative. Is there much else I can say that I like about The Story of Measurement? Uh…did I mention the graphics are visually attractive?

If you liked this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page and contribute. Also purchase his books about the metric system:

The first book is titled: Our Crumbling Invisible Infrastructure. It is a succinct set of essays  that explain why the absence of the metric system in the US is detrimental to our personal heath and our economy. These essays are separately available for free on my website,  but the book has them all in one place in print. The book may be purchased from Amazon here.


The second book is titled The Dimensions of the Cosmos. It takes the metric prefixes from yotta to Yocto and uses each metric prefix to describe a metric world. The book has a considerable number of color images to compliment the prose. It has been receiving good reviews. I think would be a great reference for US science teachers. It has a considerable number of scientific factoids and anecdotes that I believe would be of considerable educational use. It is available from Amazon here.


The third book is called Death By A Thousand Cuts, A Secret History of the Metric System in The United States. This monograph explains how we have been unable to legally deal with weights and measures in the United States from George Washington, to our current day. This book is also available on Amazon here.