Burma Going Metric?

[lpetrich]

Is Myanmar Finally Going Metric? > ENGINEERING.com noting Myanmar may finally adopt a standard measurement system | Coconuts Yangon

Myanmar does not have an official measurement system. Government websites use either imperial or metric units, and sometimes both. In 2011 and 2013, the Ministry of Commerce announced that it was preparing to adopt the metric system, but this never happened.

...
The deputy minister replied that the ministry is working to design a “metrology bill,” which will establish standard measurement units for the country.

Presumably metric units, because that's what Burma's biggest trading partners use.

Metrication, Adoption of the Decimal Metric System of Weights and Measures by Country: Burma is one of the last non-metric holdouts, along with Liberia, Samoa, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau -- and the United States.

I haven't been able to find anything with any detail on Liberia and the metric system.

Some officially-metric nations are only part of the way there, it must be conceded. Nations like Canada and the UK.

The US had a push to adopt the system in the late 1970's, but it fizzled out. Seems to me like a casualty of the end of the Sixties reform era, much like the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion.

More recently, Lincoln Chafee included a proposal to convert to it in his running for President in 2015 (Switching to the Metric System Is Officially a Presidential Campaign Issue – Mother Jones, Chafee: Go bold, go metric - CNNPolitics). He is a former US Senator from Rhode Island.

So the US is likely to continue to muddle ahead, with the metric system mainly being used in technical and behind-the-scenes applications.

[lpetrich]

Aviation's Crazy, Mixed Up Units of Measure - AeroSavvy
Special Report: Russia transition to ICAO RVSM – International Ops 2018 -- Russia using flight levels in feet
Big change: Russia finally moving to QNH – International Ops 2018 -- Russia transitioning to low altitudes being feet

The Gimli Glider accident was when an airliner ran out of fuel because it was loaded with too little fuel. This was because it was loaded with an amount of fuel in pounds that was how many kilograms of fuel that it was supposed to be loaded in. Thus getting 1/2.205 times its intended amount of fuel.

The Mars Climate Orbiter of 1998 suffered a worse accident, due to a confusion of units of rocket thrust, confusion between pounds of force and newtons. It ended up getting too close to the planet and burning up in its atmosphere.

[MattShizzle]

Most Americans don't like and forget how to use the Metric system within months of not using it - so once you're out of school (or in college and done taking physical science and Math courses) forget it.

Though some things are sold in metric units for the general public - large bottles of soda are sold in 2 & 3 (and now some smaller ones in 1 liter instead of 16 oz.) Wine and liquor switched sometime in the 1980s from the standard being 1/5 of a gallon to 750 mL (very small difference.) Beer is still in oz - std is 12 oz. Most medications are in metric units (liquid often still in tsp or Tbsp so they can be measured without an attached cup), ammunition for guns is split between mm and caliber - usually caliber for older designs and mm for newer. Note also most products have the metric equivalent on the label so they can be sold in other countries. And of course the metric prefixes are used for sizes of computer files/storage capacity.

[lpetrich]

I checked on BIPM - About the BIPM to see about progress in redefining the metric units. They plan to make an official decision in November of this year.

That effort's home page: BIPM - future revision of the SI

The meter and second will stay fixed, while the kilogram will be fixed by fixing Planck's constant. That will be done by fixing the constants in the Josephson and quantum-Hall effects. That will also have the effect of fixing the elementary charge, with the further effect of making the electric-field permittivity of the vacuum a measured quantity instead of a defined one.

Also to be fixed are Avogadro's number (the number of atomic mass units or daltons in a gram), and Boltzmann's constant (energy - temperature units conversion).

[Aupmanyav]

[quote=""MattShizzle""]Most Americans don't like and forget how to use the Metric system within months of not using it ..[/quote]That is why India made a law against the use of old measures.

[dancer_rnb]

kilobyte, megabyte and the like are a bit of a pain since they aren't based on 10, but on powers of 2. 1024 for example, not 1000.

[lpetrich]

Kibibyte -- kibibyte mebibyte gibibyte tebibyte ...

That's an alternative to the usual multiplier prefixes, an alternative that signifies multiplying by powers of 1024 rather than powers of 1000. Even though those prefixes are often used to mean powers of both 1000 and 1024, depending on the context.

[MattShizzle]

[quote=""Aupmanyav""]

Most Americans don't like and forget how to use the Metric system within months of not using it ..

That is why India made a law against the use of old measures.[/QUOTE]

Any politician who tried this would be out of a job here.

[dancer_rnb]

[quote=""lpetrich""]Kibibyte -- kibibyte mebibyte gibibyte tebibyte ...

That's an alternative to the usual multiplier prefixes, an alternative that signifies multiplying by powers of 1024 rather than powers of 1000. Even though those prefixes are often used to mean powers of both 1000 and 1024, depending on the context.[/quote]

Still, they aren't instinctive for me like 1000 or 1 million.
I have to break out a calculator to determine what a 512K memory size actually is.