Could we please stop using only feet and inches for field events in track and field broadcasts?

lobster wrote:

HRE wrote:

Sure. Let's take a sport that most US sports fans have trouble understanding and relating to and explain in measurements that those fans don't understand.

Can the average US sports fans relate to the distances involved anyway? If you ask 100 of them to guess the world records for shot put, javelin, etc. I would be flabbergasted if they come within the 10% error caused by blindly replacing "meter" with "yard." Same if you showed them a throw with no markings and asked them to guess the distance.

They probably don't know the records off the top of their head, but they'll certainly understand how far they are when given in feet and inches and likely won't if given in meters. And honestly, how many European sports (i.e. mostly soccer) could tell you those records off the top of their heads? Very few I would imagine. This whole thread seems dumb to me. NCAA Outdoor Nationals is a track meet involving American colleges that is held in the US and is broadcast on an American network. Of course the announcers will be reporting the results in feet and inches (they typically also mention the metric measurements). That is what most of their audience watching understands, and that audience doesn't want to have to figure out the conversions.

I am Sam wrote:

....and stop with your own spelling of English words, create your own language if you wish.

No 'math', put the 'u's back, stop dumbing down everything

This is even more ridiculous than demanding that American sports networks report everything only in meters. I think a lot of British spelling and grammar is kind of ridiculous (most notably things like "France have won the World Cup," but I'm not going to demand that they stop doing it.

Bad Wigins wrote:

HappyJack wrote:

I never heard this before. How does switching football from yards to meters favor the defensive?

Which is farther, ten meters or ten yards? Unless you change the rules, fewer first downs happen.

100 yards is 91.44 meters. Just make the field a round 90 meters and call it good. Make the first down marker 9 meters long.

Star wrote:

HRE wrote:

Sure. Let's take a sport that most US sports fans have trouble understanding and relating to and explain in measurements that those fans don't understand.

What is your issue in showing both - the official measurement followed by the imperial one?

None at all. Why do you think I have one?

This is why I suggest putting both imperial and metric on the screen. The average American viewer can understand the feet and inches, but also see the equivalent in metric. The long jump or shot put are actually measured in meters, so put that exact measurement on the screen with a feet and inches conversion for the American viewer.

We watch football and they say it was a 10 yard pass. They don't convert the frickin pass to meters and then put that on the screen without the 10 yard measurement. So it was an 8.23 m long jump and whatever it was in feet/inches.

bio drome wrote:

In general I agree. Temperature makes way more sense in F than C.

Water freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 doesn't make more sense to me than 0 and 100. When rain turns to snow, put a negative symbol in front of the temperature.

randomcoach wrote:

bio drome wrote:

In general I agree. Temperature makes way more sense in F than C.

Water freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 doesn't make more sense to me than 0 and 100. When rain turns to snow, put a negative symbol in front of the temperature.

Really? The metric system makes a lot of sense. A key is to stop teaching conversions. How do you know how heavy a pound is? How long a foot is or a mile is? You just "know". I know about how far a meter is (science education helps). I know about how heavy a kilogram is.

Water freezing at 0 and boiling at 100 (and note that depends on the air pressure) makes a lot of sense. I know that 20C is pretty comfortable for me and 35 is really hot. Minus single digits is nice for running to me.

As for announcers, it makes perfect sense to give imperial distances for the field events. Most people watching know 400m is the length of the track, but have a harder time wrapping their heads around a high jump of 2.1 meters.

Also, even track folks use "miles" when talking about how far they ran today. When I start to see people posting about 160km weeks consistently, then come back and talk about using metric only.

you should try living in a country where we dont know if we are metric or imperial.

we need to hate metric since it was a napoleonic invention against the british empire, but metric is just so damned easy, except kilometres are stupid and miles are cool.

i have no idea how tall i am in french. i think in imperial but work in metric.

how thick is that metal plate? 22 pounds per square foot <--- thats plain weird.

Napoleon was VERY tall, and the English kept their backward peasant system deliberately so they could claim he was short by its units.

Six feet tall in Imperial measurements is equivalent to about six stone and thruppence, IIRC.

byron evans wrote:

The metric system is dumb and needs to be replaced everywhere by imperial units. In the US if you look at a cup, you immediately know it's 8oz. Nobody knows that it's also 236.5882365 ccs. Nobody needs that many decimals in their life.

What hell even is an ounce? It’s an arbitrary thing that you see as a divine reference amount.

I think the convention is that you use mL, not ccs, when measuring liquid volume.

I have many coffee mugs. All of them hold more than 8 oz. when I fill them up. In fact, 250mL fills them perfectly.

Track distances should be converted to traditional imperial units, namely:

20 Rods

1 Chain

2 Furlongs

4 Furlongs

8 Cables

1 League

2 Leagues

The jumps should be measured in Fathoms and the throws in Chains and Links

The point was that they still don't understand the distances involved even if given in imperial units. If you're sitting at the pub with someone watching shot put and they ask if the 20 meter throw that was just announced was good or not then saying "well, that's basically 22 yards" isn't a helpful response. If they need some number in imperial units so that they can relate to but not understand the distance then swapping out metres for yards is an accurate enough conversion.

randomcoach wrote:

bio drome wrote:

In general I agree. Temperature makes way more sense in F than C.

Water freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 doesn't make more sense to me than 0 and 100. When rain turns to snow, put a negative symbol in front of the temperature.

Even though as a human I’m mostly made of water, I’m not water. 0 F wow, it’s cold! 100 F wow, it’s hot! 50 F meh.

bio drome wrote:

randomcoach wrote:

Water freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 doesn't make more sense to me than 0 and 100. When rain turns to snow, put a negative symbol in front of the temperature.

Even though as a human I’m mostly made of water, I’m not water. 0 F wow, it’s cold! 100 F wow, it’s hot! 50 F meh.

How is this much better than the celsius shorthands for typical northeast US temps?

0 C: great temp in the winter, cold in the spring or fall, freezing in the summer

10 C: great temp in the spring or fall, very hot in the winter, cold in the summer,

20 C: great temp in the summer, hot in the spring or fall

Over 30 or under -10: very unpleasantly any time of the year

Whenever the US would like to join the rest of the world they can. Until that time they can just hang out with Liberia and Myanmar as the few countries that use an old antiquated system.

Metric is unrelatable …says the guy who ran the 3000 meter steeplechase

Bad Wigins wrote:

Napoleon was VERY tall, and the English kept their backward peasant system deliberately so they could claim he was short by its units.

Six feet tall in Imperial measurements is equivalent to about six stone and thruppence, IIRC.

Funny last line.

lobster wrote:

bio drome wrote:

Even though as a human I’m mostly made of water, I’m not water. 0 F wow, it’s cold! 100 F wow, it’s hot! 50 F meh.

How is this much better than the celsius shorthands for typical northeast US temps?

0 C: great temp in the winter, cold in the spring or fall, freezing in the summer

10 C: great temp in the spring or fall, very hot in the winter, cold in the summer,

20 C: great temp in the summer, hot in the spring or fall

Over 30 or under -10: very unpleasantly any time of the year

20C (68F) is a great temperature any time. I would not consider that hot at any time but then I grew up in the southeast so "hot" is probably hotter than a lot of other folks would consider.

malmo wrote:

I'm a sesquipedalian, which literally translates to a foot and a half, so I naturally prefer imperial measure to metric. Would metric made any sense in most of your every day life?

Driving?

Cooking?

Construction?

Baseball?

Basketball?

Football?

Golf?

Shopping?

Clothing?

Etc?

Metric us unrelatable. Everybody should speak Murican and measure things in Murican.

Surely you are trolling. Imperial is totally unrelatable to anything in 95% of the world, whereas metric is not only decimal (factor of ten), but the units relate to each other.

It would be almost impossible to teach anyone that has grown up with the metric system to use imperial, whereas the reverse is pretty simple.

1 metre....1/10 millionth of quadrant of earth

1 mililitre =1 cubic centimetre. Simple, divide metre by 100, cube that.

1 ml water = 1 mg at 20 deg

1 litre of course 1 cubic decimetre and one kilolitre is 1 cubic metre, which is to one tonne of water

melting and boiling points of water is simply 0 and 100 celcius, later standardised to triple point instead

1 joule is energy of force of 1 newton through one metre, and in turn energy of 1 amp through 1 ohm for 1 second

and so on and so on.

How can you even build using imperial tape measures?

You guys are like the mum watching a marching parade, and saying "my little Johnny is the only one in step"