good riddance to cursive – good riddance to roman numerals.

Next on the list: long division. lets just teach our kids to use calculators. just kidding.

typing classes? I took a typing class when i was in high school. That’s probably a skill most kids these days have long before they get to high school.

I’m glad to see cursive go. Roman numerals, though? I use those all the time. What I’d really like to see go is British measurements—yeah, I know: Stonecutters will never let that happen.

British measurements are silly. They don’t make sense. And pretty much the entire world uses metric (which make a lot of sense). American kids end up learning metric anyway in their science classes. Of course many Americans see metric as “unamerican.”
Roman numerals have their uses, although I’m not sure they’re worth it. Personally, I use them whenever I make an outline.
Much of my ‘print’ is a mix between print and cursive. Some of the cursive letters (like the ‘b’) are better off dead. I don’t think cursive should be mourned. However, without cursive, how are we going to sign anything? Will the signature be dead too?

I tried writing in cursive recently, and I have basically forgotten how to do a lot of the letters. I’ve recently re-learned long division as well.

What’s so sensible about measuring length in units of 1/299,792,458th the distance light travels in a vacuum? That it’s approximately 1/10,000,000th the distance from the pole to the equator through the capital of some 18th Century uptopians, but not exactly that distance due to a flaw in the cumbersome survey and some incorrectness of the orignal theory?

Let’s bag the English system. There are three countries that have not yet adopted the metric system: United States, Liberia, and Burma. Great, our system of measurement is only as good as one of the most corrupt governments in the world. Wonderful.
By the way, John, I think using hours and days is perfectly acceptable within the metric system. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the sarcasm.

Cursive is not dead. It’s half of my third-graders penmanship grade. What a waste of time.

No love for cursive or Imperial measurements, it seems. I think inches et al have about 1-2 more generations left in the US, tops. Can’t speak for Burma.

I read a while ago that the apostrophe is on the way out–most of us can’t use it correctly, anyway.

Not to put words in John Mansfield’s mouth, but I think his point is that the metric system is no more ‘logocal’ than the imperial system. It is certainly easier to flow from one measurement to another (i.e. meter to kilometer), but the base units aren’t defined in usable ways. A meter has no relationship to real world things (being based on light traveling a distance in a second). You ever measured light doing that? Feet – as a measurement – were developed to measure something real and concrete for specific reasons. The rod & chain – old school survey measurements – were developed because that’s what the crew could carry. And all other imperial units – linear, weight etc. – are the same way. Now, you could make the argument – I do – that the real world inspirations for imperial units has faded so far from the reality of 21st century daily life that they are no longer obvious or useful. And if you’ve lost that, you might as well shift to a system that at least converts easily.

Just the two cents of a professional Civil Designer who spends all day going from meters to miles, and hectares to acres.

I will stop trying to be funny now. Training and working as a mechanical engineer, using whatever measurement units the problem at hand calls for has helped me value the arbitrary nature of every system of measurement. The quantities being measured are same regardless, just as physical principles are the same whether a person is thinking about them in English, French or Russian. The metric system superficially looks all neat and orderly, but when you have to use it in any rigorous way, it requires the same care as any other.

People complain about the arbitrariness of having 5280 feet in a mile and gush about the simplicity of having 1000 meters in a kilometer, and yet how many times in the last five years has either of those facts mattered to you? (They’ve mattered to me, but I think I’m an outlier.)

When some tribe of several thousand people loses its language, many lament that the world is a little poorer for the loss. I feel that way about local measurement. I like that an Englishman knows how many stones he weighs while a stone has no automatic meaning for me.

I’m with John. The only thing the metric system really makes any easier is understanding the relative scale between meters and kilometers, milliliters and liters, etc. I’m also a mechanical engineer, and while working through a calculation, it can be just as confusing to keep track of Newtons, Watts, Torr, etc.

I say keep the British system it’s just as good as anything else.

I prefer signatures in cursive. We sign our names to so many things in our lifetime. A printed “signature” would be akin to just signing with an X… As for the Roman numerals, musicians use them to designate chords, using the upper and lower case numerals to specify major and minor. Roman numerals are needed in music!

I never adopted cursive. I’ve always written using chicken-scratch printing. If we want to teach the classics, we ought to make junior high kids learn Latin. That’ll turn civilization around.

Tim–
Good catch! I’ll have to watch for that.

I want to bring back cubits.

Sorry, I can read Roman numerals and repair cuckoo clocks, but I can’t figure out the codes for linking text in a comment.

The Straight Dope addresses the question of IIII on clocks here:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_153.html

As it happens, I recently had occasion to repair a cuckoo clock, that among other problems, had lost some numbers. I purchased cuckoo clock numbers from this site:

http://www.timesavers.com/catalogmain2.asp?ProductID=19307&submit1=Search

As you can see, the numbers come in four sets of XIIIIIV, which can be broken apart to form all twelve needed numbers, if 4 is represented by IIII. So there is some basis for the idea mentioned in the Straight Dope article.

Also, as far as dissatisfaction with US customary units–a couple of points.
1. It’s a pain in education. Kids have a decent idea of what feet and inches and miles are, but when you try to teach them metrics (because science operates only with metrics) they get confused. It would be easier to teach them metrics in the first place, and forget miles, pounds, etc. completely. Science is a foreign language anyway, and introducing a foreign measuring system just makes it more difficult to learn.
2. Our hard-earned money that the government takes for taxes suffers. In 1999, the wildly expensive Mars Climate Orbiter robotic probe was lost due to a conversion problem between British and metric units. NASA subsequently converted 100% over to metrics.

One more comment. I had a science teacher, several years ago, who bought a car (I believe in Mexico) with a metric-based speedometer. If pulled over for speeding, he’d point to his speedometer, and ask the officer how fast (in kilometers) he should have been going. The officer, understandably unable to do conversions in his head, would shrug and let him go with a warning. I don’t think this guy ever got a speeding ticket…

I always hated cursive and I still don’t understand why we should teach kids what letters are and then teach them how to write them in a way so they don’t look like what we taught them. No sense. It’s just simpler to print and more readable anyway.

“Could some of you flesh out for me your dissatisfaction with U.S. customary units? “

I love baking. I hate halving or doubling recipes. Cups, pints, tablespoons. Good grief!

“The metric system superficially looks all neat and orderly, but when you have to use it in any rigorous way, it requires the same care as any other.”

I am a lab scientist, so I use weights, volumes, and temperature measures all day every day. (I seldom use length; I also use pH, which is not an issue here.) Metric is far simpler than British when making dilutions or converting between units (e.g., calibrating a pipette volume based on the weight of water).

BrianJ, as you know, the 1 mL of water = 1 gram rule is only an approximation and temperature dependent. For your calibrations, is almost three-place accuracy suitable for the task? Or do you account for the actual density of water and find it nice to use a factor that’s close to but not equal to 1?

My thanks to all who took the trouble to respond to my question about why they dislike U.S. customary units.

Nobody says Good-bye anymore, either.

And you don’t bring me flowers, anymore.

queuno! i’m a 1g american and half of my family is from/in cork! not that small of a world, but still fun.

tim, some people aren’t above using capital letters properly, they’re just really lazy.

i use cursive regularly, but my husband only uses all-capital printing because that’s all he’s allowed to use at work. he honestly didn’t even know many cursive letters till he started studying russian and was confused as to why i could copy russian words in script so well when i didn’t know the language at all. his professor actually told the class, “in russia, only retards write in block letters instead of script!”