Mark Allen

That is the interesting point.

Any system may work for some but not for others, but the systems are only held to account for their successes.

So people will say Steve Peters had a positive impact at the Tour Champs win, but nobody will ever say 'What the buck was Steve Peters doing at the Worlds'. Many successes are credited to Peters but he will never be accountable for any failure.

Same for Sight Right. Simplistically we say it works because Bingo and Williams won the WC (and other successes). However, when Sight Right players don't win then nothing is mentioned.

I have no axe to grind with either Peters or SightRight and I am sure they work for some.

Based on my (naive) understanding of SightRight, it seeks to correct an alignment error that almost all players have been making ever since they first started playing snooker.

If that's correct, then it stands to reason that correcting such an error might be very difficult for players to do, since they've (presumably) made other adjustments over time to account for the error and to limit its negative impacts. It's entirely possible that it's simultaneously true that (1) any given player would have been better off using the SightRight method from Day 1 rather than using the standard method, AND (2) that same player might be better off continuing to use the standard method rather than switching to SightRight after having used the standard method for 20-30 years already.

This might be similar in some respects to Americans continuing to use inches/feel/yards/miles and Fahrenheit rather than using millimeters/centimeters/meters/kilometers and Celsius. Even though the latter are much easier to use, Americans have been using the former for their entire lives and it would not be easy for them to make a change to what might nevertheless be an "objectively better" system...

D4P wrote:Based on my (naive) understanding of SightRight, it seeks to correct an alignment error that almost all players have been making ever since they first started playing snooker.

If that's correct, then it stands to reason that correcting such an error might be very difficult for players to do, since they've (presumably) made other adjustments over time to account for the error and to limit its negative impacts. It's entirely possible that it's simultaneously true that (1) any given player would have been better off using the SightRight method from Day 1 rather than using the standard method, AND (2) that same player might be better off continuing to use the standard method rather than switching to SightRight after having used the standard method for 20-30 years already.

This might be similar in some respects to Americans continuing to use inches/feel/yards/miles and Fahrenheit rather than using millimeters/centimeters/meters/kilometers and Celsius. Even though the latter are much easier to use, Americans have been using the former for their entire lives and it would not be easy for them to make a change to what might nevertheless be an "objectively better" system...

At the core of it is the aligngment, and I think it's a whole attitude change to inspire success.

Your post makes a lot sense... apart from your anology. Switching to millimetres etc wouldn't make any difference in skill level/performance.

Dan-cat wrote:Your post makes a lot sense... apart from your anology. Switching to millimetres etc wouldn't make any difference in skill level/performance.

No, but it would have been easier to have started with millimeters etc. in the first place, and the fact that it would have been easier to have started there doesn't necessarily mean that it's better to change over now after having been doing something else all along...

D4P wrote:

Dan-cat wrote:Your post makes a lot sense... apart from your anology. Switching to millimetres etc wouldn't make any difference in skill level/performance.

No, but it would have been easier to have started with millimeters etc. in the first place, and the fact that it would have been easier to have started there doesn't necessarily mean that it's better to change over now after having been doing something else all along...

Ah ok. Good point.

Americans brains are not really wired for metric units.

Badsnookerplayer wrote:Americans brains are not really wired for metric units.

Same could be said of a lot of older Brits....my gran still gives me a tuppeny bit for my birthday...I dare not say anything as she's as old as the Queen!

Doing 50 on the continent got me in a bit of trouble too, thankfully only a small fine, but who thought 50 in a small French village was too fast and actually meant 30mph???? Bonkers.

Ck147 wrote:

Badsnookerplayer wrote:Americans brains are not really wired for metric units.

Same could be said of a lot of older Brits....my gran still gives me a tuppeny bit for my birthday...I dare not say anything as she's as old as the Queen!

Yeah - Brits are certainly not there yet.

I am hoping that if Brexit goes through then we can return to farthings and shillings and inches and acres. Old units are inconvenient and cause spaceships to crash but they sound better.

Badsnookerplayer wrote:Americans brains are not really wired for metric units.

I will have to jump in here for just a minute to defend the homeland. I have been working 15 hour days, 7 days a week for the last few weeks so I haven't looked in on the Island much.

In comment boards across the interwebs, I read the American bashers saying we are just too stubborn or too stupid to switch to the "better" metric system. I am a Mechanical Engineer and I work most often with German manufactured machinery. I can easily work in either ISO (metric) or ANSI (American) systems for my designs. The many machine shop services I use for parts fabrication can easily accommodate any metric base designs I can throw at them. I can acquire metric raw materials from multiple warehouses if I need to though starting with a 50 x 25 mm steel bar will increase my cost about 80 percent over starting with 2" x 1" so in general, why should I pay for the metric?

The reason we do not switch to metric has nothing whatsoever to do with ordinary, everyday people you see on the street. It has to do with the infrastructure of the country and how product is manufactured and moved from place to place. I am moving paper stock through my plant right now......boxes, but boxes before they become boxes, laid out flat paperboard. When these "blanks" were designed, a part of the design was based on transportation across the highways and byways. Standard pallet size is 40" x 48" as it has been for, oh, I don't know, probably a hundred years, maybe more. I have to remove the pallets from a semi-trailer, process, and re-load on the trailer. These can fit either 26 or 30 to a load depending on orientation. I must orient at 26 to a load because I must load with a pallet jack, not driving on the trailer with a forklift. Because of this standard, the trailer itself, as all the rest of the trailers you see on the highway, is 53 feet long, just enough to fit the necessary pallets efficiently. This same sort of design interactivity applies equally to the rail and shipping industries. And of course, it also applies to every industry that manufactures and moves product, not just paper. The overwhelming majority of good product design will also include efficiency of transportation in the algorithm.

If you don't understand most or any of what the hell I just said above, that is okay, you don't really need to. The point is it has nothing to do with "stupid" Americans not being able to figure out that a meter is 39.4 inches or to leave your coat at home when it is 25 degrees C outside. It has got to do with the largest economy in the world by far which has developed efficient processes over the last century to continuously expand that economy to the point the the US Dollar remains the benchmark currency. To make that change to the metric system would be a decades long process, if it ever comes, and to date, there simply is no reason to change it. What advantage would the changeover give us, make us the largest economy in the world or something? Oh, wait a minute...


Sorry to rant, I think I am just exhausted. But I read the same ignorant comments over and over on multiple comment boards and have never responded before. Maybe I can open the eyes of at least a couple people in the world.

By the way, I perfectly agree that metric is easier, more logical, and more convenient to work in. That is not the point at all. It is very easy to snap your fingers and say, "Ok, this snooker ball which previously had a diameter of 2-1/16 inches no longer measures that but now measures 52.5 mm." But it is not so easy to say, "Ok, this whole cross-country transportation system of millions of trucks and railcars and cargo ships, that will all have to go. We will just replace this system that has worked well for a century with something better." If anyone understands anything about business, it is a very simple equation called cost versus benefit......the extraordinary cost of implementing the metric system across the economy of the USA would provide little if any tangible benefit as the current system has already developed to amazing efficiency over a very long period of time.

There are three countries who still use imperial as their official measurement system: USA, Liberia and Myanmar.

I don’t think your point really holds up Acesinc, without wanting to be rude. Every country has gone through the painful process of changing to metric at some point and all of them had infrastructure and business that ran perfectly well on imperial.

Iranu wrote:There are three countries who still use imperial as their official measurement system: USA, Liberia and Myanmar.

I don’t think your point really holds up Acesinc, without wanting to be rude. Every country has gone through the painful process of changing to metric at some point and all of them had infrastructure and business that ran perfectly well on imperial.

My point, such as it is, is that by my observation of various comment boards, the overwhelming opinion is that Americans will not switch to metric because we are either stupid, stubborn, or both. Not true. The changeover to the metric system would be a government mandate and rightfully, the government has not mandated this change because it wouldn't make any sense to do so. Private businesses in the USA, including myself, work within the metric system all the time. We export a lot of goods and we are going to give the customer what he or she asks for. For a stupid example, if an American computer paper company wants to export product, do you really think we are going to cut the paper to 8-1/2" x 11" and tell the foreign market, "That is all we have to offer so you will buy it."? No, of course not, that theoretical paper company would go out of business. It is an easy thing for that paper company to simply make sheets to the A4 size standard and sell it to the world. Big deal. The government does not need to tell them how to run their business.

I can't speak for Liberia or Myanmar, I know nothing at all about them. But as I said earlier, other countries went through the pain of the switchover because there was a benefit to it, i.e., increasing opportunity for trade with other countries, thereby eventually improving one's own national economy. Cost versus benefit. For the USA to go through the cost would not provide this benefit at this time, therefore the government (correctly in my opinion) is not mandating that it must be done. If the government were to change its mind tomorrow and say that the USA is switching over to metric, then, yes, people would gripe and moan about it, plenty of mistakes would be made, but airplanes would not fall out of the sky, lorries would continue to roll down the motorway, and eventually, Americans would learn to deal with it and even eventually embrace it like so many other countries have. But I don't believe the USA is ever going to do this just because citizens or governments of other countries tell us we should do it; we may eventually do it one day because there would be some actual, tangible benefit in doing so. That day is not today.

Aces- you have misunderstood my point. It certainly is not that metric is superior or that American people can't understand it. I meant that they are conditioned to using Imperial in everyday life and it is well embedded.

Badsnookerplayer wrote:Aces- you have misunderstood my point. It certainly is not that metric is superior or that American people can't understand it. I meant that they are conditioned to using Imperial in everyday life and it is well embedded.

Oh, but the metric system is indeed superior. That is the way to go if a country either does not have a current benchmark or if the current benchmark is hindering progress. And neither of those two things are true for the current American ANSI system. Many people refer to it, as did you, as "Imperial". Therein had been the problem for so many countries in the world....Imperial meant something different for many different places. For example, when I lived in England, I LOVED to order a pint of lager at the bar, it was much better than ordering a pint at an American bar, 25 percent better in fact. Why? An "Imperial" pint is 20 ounces while an American pint is 16 ounces. These types of discrepancies across the systems made international trade more difficult. Therefore, with the advent of the metric system, it was advantageous for so many countries to go through the pain to get on board with so many other countries and become more systematic in weights and measures. This is not the case in the USA. Private enterprise is happy to deal with the metric system as required but there is no need to incorporate it into day-to-day life, no need for a government mandate.

Think of language. It is very inefficient to have every country speaking a different language. Therefore, as your government I am going to mandate that you, BadSnookerPlayer, are going to get with the program and start speaking Mandarin Chinese, the most popular native language in the world. You will cease to speak your former native language whatever it once was and Mandarin is now your new adopted "native" language. Would there be a benefit in your government mandating this change upon you? That is about where we are at with the metric system in the USA.

Please don't think I was offended at your post. I wasn't. I am simply setting the record straight. You can call us Americans stupid and stubborn for many things. But not incorporating the metric system is not one of them. For that, you should more properly refer to us as "smug".