You know there's something wrong with US politics when NASA is forced to communicate in Imperial measurements.
"Orion’s main engine provides up to 6,000 pounds of thrust, enough to accelerate a car from 0 to 60 mph in about 2.7 seconds. At the time of the burn, Orion’s mass was 58,000 pounds and burned approximately 1,000 pounds of fuel during the firing."
I can't overstate this. NASA's use of pounds and cubic feet in its outreach efforts does not come across to science-literate people, inside or outside the US, as a sign that the country is a badass superpower that can do what it likes and ignore everyone else.
Instead it suggests that the US is a provincial nation of dungaree-wearing banjo players.
@mrundkvist Worse, NASA lost a spacecraft due to this oractice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
I don’t see it as superpower bravado but rather the inability to adapt and the low values the public places I. Science and engineering.
@farbel @mrundkvist I mean, it's not like we don't have inches and feet in Europe either. I've had to do conversions all my life too because they're commonly used in many contexts. Since the default is metric, I do the conversion the other way of course, but at the end of the day, it's still an additional cognitive load.
I was just discussing wind speed with my brother, who works at an airport. I'm used to metres per second wind speeds, but they use knots.
Why you gotta do Dungaree Wearing Banjo Players so wrong? I'd take either Pete Seeger or Bela Fleck over Trump any day of the week.
@mrundkvist I’m not reflexively opposed to the use of old-school units (many of them have useful mathematical properties that metric lacks). But in science and engineering contexts, it should be all metric all the time.
I’m fortunate to have been a reasonably bright kid during the two weeks the US made a metric push in the late 70s, and then decently trained in science that I’m reasonably comfortable in both systems.
Well, these dungaree-wearing banjo players broke the interstellar barrier, did a fly-by of Pluto, and are currently flying a team around the moon.
Ain't nothin' wrong with the banjo.
Long as you do your science right.
😀
I will say from the time President Carter was elected up through 1980 election, we kids got oriented, indoctrinated in the metric system. We were taught to use it in math classes. But after that initial push it all ebbed away. I had to confront it again in Biology/Chemistry/Physics classes in both High School and College.
Public Television even had a 1/2 hour long program (maybe it was 13 episodes total). We would watch those and learn all the relevant prefixes (even the ones that barely get used today). Like "deka-"
I found a link, it actually started in 1974 (before President Carter was elected, so we were already gearing up). https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-526-gt5fb4xq93
This series has two specific general objectives: to motivate viewers to become interested in and to want to know more about the metric system of measurement; to teach the viewers metric terms and metric units and to relate in a common-use way the more familiar metric units of measurement. "The United States is steadily becoming more and more aware of the fact that it should change, for several good reasons, to the metric system. This series was produced with the hope of making the transition from the customary to the metric system as 'painless' as possible."--1974 Peabody Awards entry form.
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