Build Question for the Lindens....

I was wondering that when I first joined, but I think that this allows people to communicate from all the countries other than the US. Personally, despite being in the US, I prefer the metric system. 1>10 v. 12>1>3

Well, I am not american, but... if you think that you should scale all you build in sl x1,25 or so (to fit avatars size), then you find that your standard "American units" way of thinking is not so useful here.

Just make a conversion table and learn the equivalences between your "american" and "sl adapted metric" sizes.

I'm British so I didn't vote.
I don't think it should change. SL may be based in America but it is a worldwide program. There are many different cultures in SL just as in RL. Metres (yes thats how i spell it - I'm british remember? lol) are accepted as a measurement in most places - people at least know of them. The Imperial system (inches, feet, yards etc) is not only harder to use for some, but there are places which have never heard of it. Changing it would just create hard work and the calculations would be harder to do for the computer. Can you imagine a box for the size of X saying []inches []feet []yards.... or even fractions of an inch (jewellry etc)
I use the Imperial system IRL but sometimes things just need to be able to be measured in smaller degrees and it is a lot easier in my view the say 1 cm than 3/8ths or 0.375 of an inch or whatever it is.
Besides, all that is ignoring what people have already said. Meters in SL are completely different to Metres in RL. They both might be measured in decimals but thats where the comparison stops really.
All this is just my opinion but there you go.

Clairexx

PS Imperial is what I was taught as inches, feet etc. It may vary to the American Standard but the concept is the same.

I voted "No", but after reading the thread, I see no harm in it, if it could be done easily. All you'd have to do is modify the client and substitute the word "yard" for the word "meter", and let those so inclined have at it. After all, as several have pointed out, the word used is irrelevant. An object which measures 5 on the Z axis is half as tall as an object which measures 10, whether it's yards, meters, or tuna fish sandwiches.

Of course, my vote is still "No," as the question is "Would more Americans like to build using the American Standard Measurement System?" and while I can speak for "more Americans", I'm fine sticking with meters. In fact, I was quite pleased the other day to recognize that I'm starting to be able to think with meters.

On a related note, I just finished building my first house. I based it on a RL floor plan. I started out using the exact measurements (as close as possible), but as the build progressed, found it necessary to diverge more and more from it. It's possible to recognize the original floor plan in the final product, but *man* are proportions in SL bizarre!

Bottom line...the use of meters and the smaller increments as the unit of measure within SL is (at least IMO) based on that system being the universal for the world. I work in Architecture and Design in RL and all through school it was done in Feet and Inches as thats what was built into the programs etc, but once I started working at a firm, I had to get used to converting everything to meters and the smaller measurements.

I would love to have the ability to choose which one to use (maybe something in the preferences?) as I work much better with Feet and Inches, but I will make due since I know SL isnt going to add that feature...

Er.. Except for the parts that don't use it..

Why is that so bad? You have just demonstrated how good we are at metric/imperial conversion without relying on charts.

Base 10 just makes more sense here when you consider things like scripting. I don't see why being able to choose your preferred system (as somebody suggested above) would be such a bad thing though. I can certainly do that in other software (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya, etc.). Why not SL?

I guess this could be done in the client.. The big problem I see with that is that it wouldn't really apply to scripts - that'd take far too much work for too little benefit.

Anya,

In the remainder of my reply I said 1) I'm sure there are exceptions, 2) I am speaking of the aerospace industry, and 3) I don't know what other industries such as architecture use.

I'm sure I could have better worded that phrase you quoted, but also it's pretty easy to pick a part out of context and refute it as is. It would be useful, and would satisfy my curiosity too, if you could give an example.

In school we refered to it as "decimal inches." In the field, we just call them inches with a number out front. "That's Oh-fifty inches." (0.050"

There are already enough rounding errors in building where you definitely do not want the values messed up even further!

Also, it is much easier to to trigonometric calculations in metric than it is in feet and inches.

o.o sounds like military...

I design electronic-related equipment in my RL job, and while we often use metric scale to specify things, we do still use the english system. 1/1000 of an inch is referred to as a 'mil'

thus your 0.050" is also called 50 mils.

You're right, Darien. I do occasionally hear that around here, too!

I didn't vote, as I'm not from USA. The Linden metre is clearly shorter than the RL metre, as evidenced by our heights when measured in-world. So everybody has to re-learn measurements, whether from feetandinchesville or metrictown.

I came to SL from UK, where they still use feet and inches quite a lot in day-to-day life. But all serious technical measurement has been metric in UK for years and years. Only the big one - geographical distance - is still given in 'imperial' measurements - i.e. miles.

The only measurement that would bug me if it went to metric is temperature. I still don't get the Celsius scale at all

I prefer the metric system in this case, makes building so much easer. As for LL's not knowing what a meter is, it all started with a mis-calculation in the early days that they never fixed. Some people, like me, make their avatars realistic sizes, but then I don't hang out in the lands of the giants so I don't mind

Well.. it makes more sense than fahrenheit lol.. 0 is freezing for water, 100 is boiling

But the conversion is this to go from F to C:

Tc = (5/9)*(Tf-32); Tc = temperature in degrees Celsius, Tf = temperature in degrees Fahrenheit

And this to go from C to F:
Tf = (9/5)*Tc+32; Tc = temperature in degrees Celsius, Tf = temperature in degrees Fahrenheit

Hmm, not doubting your integrity, but being the perpetual skeptic, are you sure that the "meter" in SL isn't just what you get when you divide a sim length on a side by 256? If they made the meter real, by RL standards, they would either have to resize the standard sim, or use an ugly number that isn't so easily divisible like 256. I'm just guessing that, so if you know a story I've never seen, I'd love to see it.

P.S. Whether through a miscalculation, or however they came about, maybe they should have called them "Linden meters."

Well Metric is just easier for most of the world to think in, I can use both, but I hate having 2 sets of spanners for metric and imperial cars or machines at work. Sooner or later metric will be all there is, might as well get used to it.

The heck with American & Metric!!! Use my Dad's measurement:

A C**T Hair. As in "Just move it a C**T hair more to the left"

I can deal with either one actually. Metric is just easier to break down into smaller measurements.

This is what you said:



That is, you said decimal inches were used almost exclusively in American engineering and supported it with an aerospace example. I can say from personal experience that two of top 7 fortune-500 companies use the metric system in engineering (the largest aerospace company weighs in at 2. And most (perhaps all) of the technical papers I've read, including those out of aerospace, were in metric units.

A quick google search didn't turn up anything authoritative, but here's a guy...

http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj/

who wrote here...

http://sm3a.gsfc.nasa.gov/messages/618.html

that "about 40% of American manufacturing and retail business is done in metric". And that was eight years ago. He included a timeline for the metrification of the US.

In my googling I did find that aircraft are still built in decimal inches.

I believe architecture is still English in the US. It certainly is on the retail end.

Temperatures that people most often care about (the weather) are almost never less than 0 or greater than 100 on the fahrenheit scale. Negative numbers don't make sense to people, and 0-100 is an intuitive range for cold-to-hot.

Yes, and I should have worded that better so that I wasn't making claims outside of my experience. To me, of course, aircraft are everything. But thanks for providing the info. I'm more interested in learning what's true than trying to argue my poor choice of words.

Anyway, the two points I was originally trying to make were that 1) U.S. scientists do not always convert to metric to provide clarity, and 2) using decimal inches isn't crazy, but is quite common. I was also trying to fish for the architecture answer, since that would likely be most appropriate to building uses in SL.

Wow, the timeline in that link with the wording about 2009 and it being "illegal" etc., is very interesting and difficult to believe, but we don't have long to wait to see if that's true, do we?