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In this thread: people bending over backwards to defend their insane, non-logical unit of measurement
Logical, mathematically convenient, but not practically convenient. Without a measuring tool, there’s no good way to estimate anything besides a centimeter.
Every imperial unit of measure can be estimated whilst naked (but preferably clothed).
An inch is your distal thumb phalanx. A foot is your foot. A mile is, or was at one point, roughly 1,000 paces.
The weather can be estimated by going outside. Is it too hot? It’s in the upper third of the 100 degree scale. Too cold? Lower third, might snow. Cool enough to fully dress, but not too cold, right in the middle.
A healthy, big person is about 200 lbs. A very small person is about 100 lbs.
Converting between these units is useful in science, which is why science uses metric. But you could live your entire life on earth and never need to know how many distal phanages are in 1,000 paces. It literally never comes up. Who cares?
It’s why units are divided into fractions, rather than into a decimal system.
By the way, the only reason we use a base 10 numbering system in the first place is because we have ten fingers and it was easier for early mathematicians to count. But I digress.
If you’re dividing a length of rope, and all you have is the rope, it’s simple to divide it in half, and then half again, and then again in half. You could even divide into thirds, if you were feeling frisky. You just fold it over itself until the lengths are even. There are two friendly numbers that are difficult to do that with, though. Can you guess what they are? If you guessed 5 and 10, you nailed it, good job.
Same with piles of grain or hunks of beef or chunks of precious metals.
But what about units of volume, you ask? I don’t have a part of my body that holds roughly 8 oz of fluid to pour out. No, for that you’ll need a cup. Just a cup. Not a graduated cup with a bunch of little lines down the side. 1 cup. Or half a cup, or a third, or maybe a quarter cup. Again, easily divisible for easy measuring without any special tools.
But a gallon, you protest. A gallon is 16 cups! What the fuck is 16 cups good for? Why not 10 or 100, or create a decigallon for simple math? Because 16 can be divided in half 4 times. Measuring out portions of the whole is as simple as pouring out equal portions into similarly sized containers. Divisible numbers are easier to use without graduated equipment.
And that’s why time is measured in 24 hours, each hour is 60 minutes, each minute is 60 seconds. There’s a ton of history there, and we’ll ignore for this discussion the inaccuracy of measuring a day or a year. If the metric system is entirely superior, why don’t you demand we all switch to metric time? A year will still be roughly 365 days (again, setting aside the inaccuracy) but we could divide the day into 10 equal metric hours, or mours, and those mours into 100 metric minutes, or metrinutes, and then those metrinutes into 100 metric seconds, or meconds. 1 mecond would be 0.864 seconds, and a metrinute would be 1.44 minutes, which to most people would be an imperceptible difference in time. Hey, how many seconds is 1.44 minutes? You don’t know without a calculator because we don’t use metric for time, and it probably never bothered you once before now. What an insane, non-logical unit of measure time is.
Yes, metric let’s us convert millimeters to kilometers, or helps us determine how many calories it take increase 1 cubic centimeter of water by 10 degrees kelvin. It helps with those things because the units are arbitrarily defined to make the math easier, not to make the measurement easier. But that’s it, there’s no additional sanity, no additional logic. It’s easier to convert between units via math, because it was designed to be easier to convert between units via math. There are no additional benefits to the metric system.
This is either a way too elaborate troll or one of the dumbest things I have ever read and I can’t figure out which it is.
Point to the thing I said that was not true.
Wow you are actually serious. Okay here we go.
- Units of measurement are made to be accurate, while most of your rant talks about “estimating”. Being easily estimated adds zero value and it’s something you invented to try and make your point.
- Disregarding point 1, every single thing you said can be reversed by someone used to metric. I have no clue how to estimate things in imperial, but I can easily estimate 1 cm, 1 meter, 1 litre, 1kg, etc with a similar margin of error as you can estimate imperial, because I’m used to it.
- Your point about temperatures is the most boneheaded of the entire paragraph. Go to Chicago, ask someone what is “kind of hot” and what is “kind of cold”, and compare it to a New Orleans resident. Wanna bet they give wildly different answers? Also, again: what is the merit of this? If it’s 30 degrees C outside I consider it hot, 5 or below is cold. What does it matter which numbers you find important?
- About your rope, or your piles of grain and hunks of beef. I have no clue what your point is there. Do you know what we do when we want more precision? We just move the decimal point. You want 1/5 of a kg of beef? Might want to ask for 200 grams instead. I don’t even know what kind of point you’re trying to make there.
- Metric is standardised. A metre in Belgium is the same as a metre in France, and a metre in Norway, etc. You’re talking about a ounce. You mean an imperial ounce or a US ounce? Do you like pints? Do you want a US pint or prefer an Imperial one? Space ships have crashed because of nonsense like this.
As a final example, let’s go beyond units of measurement. If I place a book on the table and ask you to estimate the value of it: you might say something like 20$? I might say something like €20? We just use the currency we’re familiar with. What if I ask you to estimate the value of that same book in Vietnamese Dong without looking up anything? 50? 100? 200 000? I wouldn’t know. I don’t know if you buy a pencil sharpener or a car with 200k Vietnamese Dong. But a Vietnamese person would know, right?
You’re talking purely from a perspective of someone that is very familiar with one system and has very little knowledge of the other. It’s not that you -by your own omission- can only estimate something like a centimeter and not much else that the rest of the world breaks down when they see a 3 centimeter rope. Both systems might have merit, but metric is a clearly superior system in almost any perceivable and objective way that I can think of.
A foot is a foot. Fantastic. Glad to know everyone has the same sized feet.
And the same length on their legs so we all pace the same distance.
I would say good troll, but it just seems too long to be ironic.
Is every location at the exact same elevation? Varying elevations have varying atmospheric pressures. You’ve got the Netherlands at 0 m elevation, and places in Bolivia like La Paz and El Alto which are ~4000 m elevation. That’s an atmospheric pressure of 101 kPa for the Netherlands and 57.2-69.7 kPa for the Bolivian cities (I don’t have the time to interpolate the data table unfortunately). This corresponds to a drop in the boiling point of water from 100 C to approx 86.5 C.
Both systems have just as arbitrary reference points. They also both have absurd conversions – why isn’t it 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, 10 hours to a day, 10 days to a week, etc? It would make my work so much easier if time was powers of 10, but that’s where metric stops?
Good thing that Celcius is scaleable with Kelvin, which is scaleable with Pascal and meters. So you can easily calculate very precisely what temperature the water will boil at depending on your elevation.
Time is measured at a base of 12. Because it’s far easier to create mechanical watches on a base of 12.
What is important is that it’s a standardized measurement. We all have the same second.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to make arguments for Fahrenheit or if you’re just reciting your 7:th grade physics homework
It’s a measurement system for humans not calculators.
It’s a measurement system for dumbasses who are scared of base 10 operations
There aren’t many instances in normal life where accuracy and precision are that important. Modern humans can measure distances with lasers and satellite coordinates. You probably own a tape measure and at least one type of scale. But unless you’re building something, baking something, or selling something by weight, estimates are almost as good as knowing something precisely.
We see the same in countries that us metric. Most people estimate how many meters, kgs, or liters things are because taking the time to accurately measure isn’t necessary. Maybe your phone tracks your daily jog, but that’s only going to be accurate to within a few meters, and most people would round off to the nearest significant digit anyway.
Yes. People estimate things. Because we don’t carry around a scale in our pockets. What does that have to do with anything?
The point of metric system is that things should be scaleable. And relatable. Between different types of measurements, such as weight and volume.
Yes, that’s the point. The imperial system has been succesful and remains popular because people do carry around (rough) scales with us most of the time, and because the advantage of being accurate and scalable really isn’t that useful in day to day living. Having a single unit of measure for the length of a aheet of paper and the distance to the nearest city isn’t a significant advantage for most people in most applications. I don’t need to know how many inches are in a mile, because the conversion usually isn’t necessary. The point of the metric system you’ve described has no advantage in most normal use cases, and we use it when it does have an advantage.
What do you mean “remain popular”? The imperial system has roughly 500 million users. While metric has over 7 billion.
And even in the countries where imperial is used, the scientific community in them still use metric.
How can you even attempt to talk about the advantage of normal use, when you don’t even know how to use them?
Metric is a tool. Just because you don’t know how to use the tool, doesn’t mean it’s not advantageous.
Ofc conversions in imperial isn’t necessary, it’s gibberish. No normal person will be able to relate the two.
Your argument boils down to you telling us writing is pointless because no one knows how to read.
Ofc they can’t read when there’s nothing to read.
How can you even attempt to talk about the advantage of normal use, when you don’t even know how to use them?
Metric is a tool. Just because you don’t know how to use the tool, doesn’t mean it’s not advantageous.
Ofc conversions in imperial isn’t necessary, it’s gibberish. No normal person will be able to relate the two.
Are you under the impression that Americans don’t know how to use the metric system? We learn to use it in elementary school. We regularly go between the two and relate them to each other.
Your comment is unnecessarily arrogant based on complete ignorance.
A foot is a foot. Fantastic. Glad to know everyone has the same sized feet.
First off, it’s an estimate. Your feet don’t need to be exactly 12 inches/1 foot. If your feet are only 10 inches long, it’s still useful information because you know your margin of error.
That being said, there’s no reason why you can’t also do this trick with the metric system. You would just need to divide the amount-of-human-foot-length by around 4 to get your human -foot-measurement into meters.
I feel like a lot of this is based on what you grew up with and you eventually related it to something to make it easier for you.
Like a cm is the width of a fingernail. A dm(10cm) is the size of a middle finger. 100m is 1 minute of walking. I know 1 metre is my normal stride.
Is it too hot? 30s. Is it cold? Less than 10. Is there snow? Less than 0. Is it cool enough to fully dress but not too cold? Around 20.
Big person? 100kg. Small person? 50kg.
The point is that you can make any system relatable.
Of course you’re right. The point isn’t that one is better than another, the point is that Imperial was historically easy to share and use. There’s a sense among metric users that the imperial system is stupid, illogical, unwieldy, and useless (see the comic and almost every comment in the thread). None of those things are true, and the advantages of the metric system hardly ever come up for most people.
It’s easy to hur dur Americans stupid, but the reality is always more complex.
Oh it’s absolutely just based on where you grew up. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone uses a rather stupid time system compared to metric measurements, but we stick with it because that’s what everyone is used to.
You know, this convinced me…
that I wouldn’t mind metric time actually
RemindMe 10 Megaseconds
I actually wrote a paper in high school extolling the virtues of metric time. It was not persuasive.
How dare you have reasons and explaining them so thoroughly. I’m here to hate people because they are dumb.
Brilliant. Now if we only used base 12 numbering system, things would be even easier to halve.
Base 12 is better than base 10, but base 16, aka Hexadecimal is better still.
Base 16 is only divisible by a single prime, just a fancy name for base 2.
OK I’m looking up the history of the metric system now.
Have a go at ‘The Measure of All Things’ by Ken Alder, a very interesting book on that subject.
Thanks! Bookmarked (I got a ton of lemmy bookmarks, lots of reading to do lol)
Alternatively, people insisting that Americans must be math gods for using such a demanding and archaic system.
And plenty of people who don’t really care to understand how deep the roots of inch stuff is. Most people have no clue how much aerospace is commanding the need for Inch. (ALL and every aerospace fasteners are inch.)
Curious, since NASA uses metric. How do the two industries work together?
interestingly enough, there is an incident where a unit conversion cause a spacecraft to crash.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
NASA specifies that companies who work with NASA should use metric units as a part of the contract. Lockheed produced software that output in imperial units and it caused the orbiter to flame out.
Ah nice, this should be a constructive dialogue between open minded and empathetic individuals.
grabs popcorn
how many ounces of popcorn?
How many liters?
Meteric, customary, whatever. But volume for dry food measurement??
And are we talking compressed or with space for air?
I’m struggling to understand the joke, can you kindly explain? Is this an imperial vs metric thing?
The joke is that British people have so little going for them that they must resort to making inaccurate jokes about outdated stereotypes based on cultural generalizations.
That’s not exclusive to the British, everyone does it.
Why are you bringing the British into this? What did they do to you?
They brought us the Imperial system.
A truly logic system would be entirely designed around a base-12 number system. But we were born with an imperfect set of 10 fingers and that doomed us.
Those aliens have 6 fingers. It’s an absolutely ironic twist that their discussion on measuring systems is super illogical for them, and yet logical is the verbiage they use.
I’ll also defend fractional measurements over decimal to my dying breath. Decimal measurements can’t express precision very well at all. You can only increase or decrease precision by a power of 10.
If your measurement is precise to a quarter of a unit, how do you express that in decimal? “.25” is implying that your measurement is precise to 1/100th - misrepresenting precision by a factor of 25.
Meanwhile with fractions it’s easy. 1/4. Oh, your measurement of 1/4 meter is actually super duper precise? Great! Just don’t reduce the fraction.
928/3712 is the same number as 1/4 or .25, but now you know exactly how precise the measurement is. Whereas with a decimal measurement you either have to say it’s precise to 1/1000th (0.250), which is massively understating the precision, or 1/10000th (0.2500), which is massively overstating it.
Fractional measurements are awesome.
This is one of the dumbest fucking trolls I’ve ever seen.
Congratulations? I guess?
Honestly, I don’t give a shit either way. Wish us 'mericans were on the same wavelength as the rest of the world, but we’re awful in so many ways it doesn’t even register.
However, this troll is gold and I think you’re all sleeping on his genius
i’ve never heard of anyone using non-reduced fractions to measure precision. if you go into a machine shop and ask for a part to be milled to 16/64”, they will ask you what precision you need, they would never assume that means 16/64”±1/128”.
if you need custom precision in any case, you can always specify that by hand, fractional or decimal.
But you can’t specify it with decimal. That’s my point. How do you tell the machine operator it needs to be precise to the 64th in decimal? “0.015625” implies precision over 15,000x as precise as 1/64th. The difference between 1/10 and 1/100 is massive, and decimal has no way of expressing it with significant figures.
sure you can, you say “i need a hole with diameter 0.25” ± 0.015625“”. it doesn’t matter that you have more sig figs when you state your precision
but regardless, that’s probably not the precision you care about. there’s a good chance that you actually want something totally different, like 0.25±0.1”. with decimal, it’s exceptionally clear what that means, even for complicated/very small decimals. doing the same thing fractionally has to be written as 1/4±1/10”, meaning you have to figure out what that range of values are (7/20” to 3/20”)
Having to provide a “+/-” for a measurement is a silly alternative to using a measurement that already includes precision. You’re just so used to doing things a stupid way that you don’t see it.
providing an arbitrarily non-reduced fraction is an even sillier alternative. the same fundamental issue arises either way, and it’s much clearer to use obvious semantics that everyone can understand
It’s not the same issue at all.
How do you represent 1/64th in decimal without implying greater or lesser precision? Or 1/3rd? Or 1/2 or literally anything that isn’t a power of 10?
You’re defending the practice of saying “this number, but maybe not because we can’t actually measure that precisely, so here’s some more numbers you can use to figure out how precise or measurements are”
How is that a more elegant solution than simply having the precision recorded in a single rational measurement?
No measured value will be perfectly precise, so it doesn’t make sense to use that as a criteria for a system of measurement. You’re never going to be able to cut a board to exactly 1/3 of a foot, so it doesn’t matter that the metric value will be rounded a bit.
Not “a bit”. You can have a 9x difference in precision and be unable to record it.
This feels like such a niche reason to prefer fractional measurements.
I’m scratching my head, wondering why all the downvotes.
I’ve always sucked at math tbh, but fractional measurements are my jam. It goes faster in my head and I can visualize things better.
Base 10 is the most easy to scale, you just move the coma and add 0s. Base 12 doesn’t allow that easily
A base 12 number system would have two extra symbols. Twelve would be written 10 and be called ten, and the number 144 would be written 100 and be called one hundred.
Everything you may think is inherent to base 10 is largely not. The quirky rules of 9’s multiplication table would apply to 11’s. Pi and e would still be irrational, and continue being no no matter which base of N you choose. Long division would work the same. Etc.
Base 6 however is perfect for 2 hands with 5 fingers each. You can easily represent the six possible digits 0 1 2 3 4 5 on each hand, and can therefore comfortably count to 55 (decimal 35) with two hands, using our familiar place-value numeral system.
I like the idea of base 12 counting the segments of your fingers with your thumb. Though its less intuitive.
When my American friends insist that feet and inches is just easier for them, I just nod in agreement and give them measurements using rods, chains and furlongs as well. If you’re going to go Imperial, you have to know 'em all. An acre is a chain by a furlong, totally logical as that would be 4x40 rods which is of course 43560 square feet. I guess it makes complete sense when your world is only a few furlongs across.
Most people who insist that imperial is better still have absolutely no idea how many spoons there are to a cup, how many cups to a gallon, how many inches to a mile, how many square yards to an acre.
As an American, anyone who claims the Imperial system is better about anything is lying or stubborn. An argument could be barely made for Fahrenheit and even then it’s not worth it.
For what it’s worth, a chain is a literal standardized metal chain that surveyors used when physically staking out parcels. It’s not a unit normal people have ever used.
An acre is a chain by a furlong because a furlong is the distance you’d plow with an ox, and an acre is about the area you’d plow in a day. They derived the standard chain from that, much as metric chains are 20 meters or 30 meters. France used to use 10 meter chains, with 20cm links.
Normal people don’t measure things in chains, whether metric chains or imperial.
I mean I can respect that if they’ve just really known imperial forever. I just take issue with them confusing it being easier for them for that specific reason with it being intersubjectively better, which is dumb.
how about we all agree that the best system is american units with metric prefixes. After all it is obvious that it takes an hours to drive 318 kilofeet
I love the smell of Kilofeet in the morning 😂
What’s that in centimiles?
6,000 cm
See? This is why I like our system the best. It just got those nice even numbers. 318 kf = 6000 cm, easy peasy.
Sorry did the math wrong its 100,000,000 cm
That makes more sense. I knew it was over 9000!
do you want d&D memes because this is how you get D&D memes
I’ll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/iJymKowx8cY
TLDW: metric is better because all the different kinds of units were designed to work together.
Where as imperial units developed organically, within specific trades/use cases. They’re not all supposed to work together.
I use imperial because that’s what I was raised with, but I recognize metric is better in many ways. My only gripe with metric is the gap in units between Centimeters and Meters. A foot is convenient size for most things.
Well buddy, you’re in luck because today you get to stop griping about something that’s been part of SI units for the entirety of SI units.
“If you’re under eighteen decimeters, swipe left.”
Interesting. Looks like a decimeter comes out to just under 4", so still a fair bit less than a foot. I guess that’s where a half-meter would come in. Honestly I think I just like imperial linguisticly, the terms and slang for all the units tickles me. Metric has a more sterile vibe. Which is fine, I reckon that was the whole idea of it!
Fun fact British imperial units are slightly different than American, because of course they are! This is an issue for folks that own, and work on, vintage British cars. American wrenches don’t fit!
Jefferson actually intended to make metric standard in the US back in 1793. Unfortunately, the ship carrying the standard measurements from France was captured by pirates.
Wake up babe! I know what we’re gonna use our time machine for…
That’s why we have decimeters…
It’s a decimal system, so t’s “all in 10th” deci=1/10. Meter > decimetre (dm) > centimetre (cm). So I think what you’re looking for is decimetre (dm) = tenth of a meter 😊
And centi denoting a factor of one hundredth and so on 🙃
In was just thinking of this video! There really are some legitimately good things about the imperial system, but metric is still better, but imo not quite enough better to take the work of converting everything in the country over to it
Interestingly no one actually uses centimetres, in my line of work everything is measure in millimetres, even something over a metre. Average sheet steel size is 2400 x 1200 mm
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“Why do they use the much more complicated system?” “Nobody actually knows.”
Oh my god get a new joke. The U.S. uses both systems just like everyone else.
This is essentially incorrect; the vast majority of people here use the inferior system in everyday usage.
But there are everyday examples where both are used.
E.g. If you see someone drinking a soda and ask them how much sugar is in it they’d probably tell you a number in grams.
Or if you have to take cough syrup the dosage is usually in milliliters.
Or if you ask someone what size engine their car has they’ll most likely tell you in liters.
And no one brings up that the UK actually uses both and in a lot more confusing way. Fuel in Liters but efficiency in miles per gallon. Speed in miles per hour but how far you drive in Kilometers. Weight of produce in grams and people in stone.
And even then British gallons are different from American gallons so the efficiency numbers look really frickin’ weird.
This isn’t very accurate. Imperial is used for car and travel related measurements, metric is used elsewhere (officially). It would be nice if we switched to metric but it is OK.
Fuel in Liters but efficiency in miles per gallon.
Yeah, I think this is basically the only confusing and annoying imperial/metric thing we have.
Speed in miles per hour but how far you drive in Kilometers.
We don’t use kilometers for how far we drive. We still use miles on signage and in everyday speech, along with miles per hour. I imagine if we switched to kilometers per hour, we would start using kilometers.
Weight of produce in grams and people in stone.
Older generations might still use stone but it is disappearing. Even my retired dad uses kg now. Younger generations are not taught stone (for decades now), as they grow up it will disappear.
It is a similar story to height in feet and inches. It is becoming less common, but probably slower than the switch away from stone.
Plus, many of us are in STEM fields and appreciate/prefer the metric/SI system. However, we think in imperial units because that’s what we used in daily life in our formative years.
I have no problem with metric units, but I do a rough mental conversion to imperial to relate to the measurement, and get a “feel” for it. This goes for temperature, distance, speed, volume, weight/mass, pressure, and essentially anything else that’s an everyday unit.
It’s analogous to how much of the world thinks of nuclear explosions in terms of kilotons or megatons of TNT. I mean, all you have to do is multiply megatons by 4.184e+15 and you’re back to the sensible unit of Joules. :)
I go back to what my professor in my first engineering class told us – a good engineer can work in any unit system.
At the end of the day, imperial vs metric is an argument you have over some beers with friends. It’s inconsequential.
Hell, I’m not an engineer and that’s something I was taught in school. In Texas. In the 80’s.
Man, this place has devolved so horrendously…
Man :/
That’s a damn good point, the distance doesn’t change regardless of what you call it.
Exactly. This isn’t rocket science, it’s simple math. And by knowing two unit systems, you can describe the distance in the most convenient way possible.
You are funny. Most places do not use “both”. They use metric and… Sometimes they switch to metric for good measure (hah!). To believe that the whole world does the old convert around is confirming another US stereotype (everyone else is like we are and that’s a given) while you try to get us to stop mocking us stereotypes. Oh the irony!
Are you saying that only the US really constantly has to do conversions between both systems? Are you saying that Americans are always doing a bunch of math that the rest of you aren’t?
I regret to inform you that… Yes, you are doing some math other’s don’t. Except for the British, those people are beyond savior with their obnoxious mix of weird unit collections.
Yes, only places where it is mixed is the anglosaxony… try to open to the world.
I use pounds because I do archery, where my bow’s power is measured with that unit, which I translate as 1/2 a kg. I don’t care that it’s inaccurate.
There are also inches (I think) for Tv and computer screens, which is shitty.
But no one else uses imperial.
I worked with croncrete blocks (prefabricated building elements) some years ago and I was all the time making fast calculations of sizes and weight and I cannot imagine making that in imperial (admittedly because I am not used, but in present case it would just have been massively impractical)
It’s true that the vast majority of the world uses only metric but Western English speaking countries tend to use a mix.
The UK is mixed, Ireland (where I am) is mostly metric but a person’s height is still mostly imperial and butter is sold in 454g packs (a pound) and older folks still measure their weight in stones and pounds, Canada uses a mix (my sister lives there and we discussed this recently) and the US uses metric where appropriate (science, military, medicine).
The only irony here is your ignorant self mocking me for my alleged ignorance. Most countries don’t use metric and imperial, but they use metric and something.
And just as general advice, mocking and generalizing other people due to their nationality is a primitive and smoothbrained behavior. Grow up.
Ah… No mate, there are no “somethings” for “most countries”. Most of the world uses straight up metric and that’s it. What “local systems” do you know of that get used alongside metric?
And regarding the grow up part… See, here in Europe everybody will crack jokes about everybody else. French laugh at Germans, Polish mock the Spanish and everyone laughs at the British because they can’t come back at us since they had their little voting oopsie and now need a form to import jokes into the EU.
Remember that one kid that never got the joke, took what was said in jest at face value, got upset and thus mocked even more? Americans have a surprising tendency to be that kid.
There are “something” for a lot of things that are not in metrics.
Like tire sizes. My bow’s power is measured in pounds (and I should use inches there too normally. I don’t bother.) Screen sizes are in inches I think…
95% work in metrics. But there is always a little stuff in some weird units.
“Remember that one kid that never got the joke, took what was said in jest at face value, got upset and thus mocked even more?”
Please stop, the irony, it’s too much.
You don’t use both, or at least, surely you mean “both” for cases where you are forced, like me by American online stores. And this joke won’t stop until you get rid of that shitty system.
Except we do use both. Sorry but you’re just wrong.
And sure, you’re entirely welcome to keep making the same joke over and over and pretending it’s still funny. Show that dead horse who’s boss.
Very few countries use both systems.
True but the ones that do are Western English speaking countries like the UK, Ireland (where I am and which is in the final throws of ditching Imperial), Canada and to a lesser extent the US, which uses metric where appropriate.
Those countries are going to be disproportionately represented on here.
I read an article many years ago on why the the US hadn’t gone metric and cost is a huge factor. Just replacing all the speed signs across such a huge land mass would be serious money for example with limited benefit.
Folks deal with the change itself just fine. I’ve lived though the change to metric and my parents lived through the change to decimal currency from shillings etc just fine also so ultimately the US still uses Imperial because it works just fine and the hassle of changing isn’t worth it.
Only going to cost more down the line, sunk cost fallacy, etc…
Not really, they can use them until they need to be replaced and then have the replacements have both.
You’d have to have them in different cookies like Texas does with those bullshit fucking day/night speed limits
True. The U.S. is one of them.
In reality, while most countries don’t use metric and imperial, they do use metric and some other local system of measurements. Many countries use both metric and their historically preferred system.
.
The vast majority of the world does not use imperial units.
But why did we pick base 10, was it because we have 10 fingers? That little dude has 3 fingers per hand. Seems like they would end up using base 6 and design a whole system around that, and base 10 would be strange to them.
Mostly because it’s very easy to make calculation on base 10. If i ask you to tell me how many millimeters are in 5.7 meters you could probably reply easily without a calculator. You probably wouldn’t do it as easily if it wasn’t base 10
We define 1000 mm as one meter as we are base 10 centric. If we live in a base 8 world, we would have define 8x8x8 mm as one metre and the answer to 5.7 m base 8 would be 5700mm base 8 too
It’s not fundamentally easier to do calculations in base 10. It’s only easier for us because that’s what we learn as children.
If our number system was based on a superior base, like dozenal or senary, we would be able to do calculations on that base easily and would find working in tens awkward.
Man I love this comic. Glad to see it on Lemmy!
Silly Americans, you could be measuring your winnies in GIGAMETERS and yet decide to keep using the kings thumb as a reference for it*
Why use decimals when reducing fractions is SO EASY
I find imperial vs metric to be a question of practicality vs ideality, and as an engineer I tend towards the former. Either way it doesn’t really matter, because unit conversions are easy math, and a good engineer can work in any unit system.
In defense of imperial, to balance things out here:
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I almost never need to go from inches to feet to yards to miles. Conversions like that play almost no role in my daily life. Easily going from mm to cm to m to km is a solution in need of a problem.
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Because imperial isn’t bound by a constant conversion factor, you can use several points of reference. An inch is about the size of one knuckle. A foot is roughly the size of… A foot. Most of the time, I don’t need anything more than this. Although to be fair, I rarely need this even. Smaller than an inch is all metric though, easily.
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Imperial is sometimes more convenient. Twelve seems like an usual number for inches to feet, but twelve is also easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. I can instantly convert from fractional feet to inches for the most common fractions.
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I’m going to say it, both temperature scales make sense. Celsius being based on water makes a lot of sense, it’s the most ubiquitous substance. Fahrenheit makes sense too in terms of climate and the weather that people experience – it’s harder to go more simple than 0 = very cold and 100 = very hot.
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Conversions actually aren’t universally good for metric. Joules are great for abstract concepts, but not so much more realistic matters. The energy required to raise 1 g of water by 1 deg C is 4.184 Joules – or more simply, 1 calorie. Calorie is actually neither imperial nor metric. Metric here loses the intuitiveness of water, while SI takes a big W. Another example, mass and weight. In metric, 1 kg is 9.8 Newtons. Most places don’t bother with Newtons and stick to kg. In imperial, 1 pound mass is 1 pound weight. They have been set equal to each other by definition. Mass to weight calculations will always be much easier in imperial, and that’s rather nice for looking at chemistry and flowrates and equipment requirements.
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Imperial is better for K-12 education, another unpopular opinion. It requires children to learn going from inches to feet to yards, which uses math far more regularly than metric does. For lengths, it’s great for teaching fractions. Unit conversions between systems are taught often, which gives students a basis when you’re converting other units, like moles and kilograms in chemistry.
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It teaches you to always label your fucking units. It’s incredibly bad engineering practice to do this, even if you work solely in one unit system, because you almost certainly aren’t using just one unit. Hell when it comes to pressure, with kPa, psi, atmospheres, and bar, it really doesn’t matter what unit system you’re using.
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Metric defines some units in a way that’s good for science but bad for everyday life. A pascal is 1 newton of force per square meter. Our atmosphere is 101,125 Pascals. You see kPa used constantly because the defined unit is absurdly small. The same goes for a Joule, it’s the work done to move a 1 newton object 1 meter. Chemical reaction energy is measured on the basis of kJ per mole (or kg). The defined unit is really small.
TLDR: Convenience + Practicality vs Ideality + Logic
The amount of downvotes for a thoroughly explained opinion tells me this is Reddit now.
Yeah it’s disappointing. Several weeks ago, it would’ve been upvoted not because people agreed with it, but because it contributed to a thoughtful discussion. I’m an engineer. I’ve probably had to explicitly consider and think about units more in a year than most people here have in their lifetimes.
I just can’t wrap my head around this thread. You’d think Americans were math geniuses by age 12 with how hard they’re making this out to be.
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Gonna take a shit on this idea like a good American and say dealing with fractions is easier than irrational decimals. I do like the metric system tho and I wish we would switch at least some things like temp and road speed over.
The only reason we do things in fractions of an inch are because we use inches.
Irrational decimal? You mean multiplying and dividing by factors of ten?
I never understood how it’s much easier to work with “three eights of an inch” than with one centimeter. Or how 6ft3 is easier to work with than 1.90m. The first one combines two measurement units and has very bad accuracy, the second one is straight forward dealing with fractions of itself and can be made even more precise if needed.
At least Americans are consistent. I think Canadians are the most confused.
Height: imperial
Weight: imperial
Long distance: metric or time
Short distance: feet
Cooking: imperial
Filling gasoline: metric
Temperature: Celsius
Height of mountains: metric
Cruising altitude: imperial
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When I’m doing things that require precision: grams and °C
When I’m telling how the room or the temp outside is, °F
Why? Because 0°F to 100°F is way more reasonable for telling comfort than -17.78°C to 37.78°C
It’s not that hard to use both and anyone incapable of doing so is an idiot.
Me, omw to do a little trolling by using Kelvin instead
What’s really funny? All thermometers are calibrated using 0°F
Add ammonium hydroxide to ice water and the mixture will always be 0°F. Everyone calibrates their thermometer this way.
Interesting! I bet you need a second point for calibration though. It would be funny if it was boiling water, i.e. 100°C.
You’d half to take elevation into account. It’s 100°C at sea level. For every ~150m (500ft) you go up in elevation, you should expect the boiling temperature to be about 0.5°C less.
I very much doubt a celcius thermometer would be calibrated in farheneigt in a country where people don’t use this metric, but you gotta convince yourself I guess.
Then you don’t know how to calibrate thermometers.
You can’t use boiling or freezing water. The boiling and freezing point of water changes based on pressure.
Any mixture of liquid water, frozen water, and ammonium hydroxide is 0°F at any pressure (assuming it itself isn’t boiling or freezing), which you can then calibrate to STP with a bit of math.
Because 0°F to 100°F is way more reasonable for telling comfort than -17.78°C to 37.78°C
There is nothing more reasonable about F in that scenario. You like it because you are familiar with it, that’s it. I can assure you that celsius is perfectly reasonable for telling you the room temperature. Billions of people use it without any problems, decimals and all (which is apparently something that Americans find extremely scary).
American here. A ⅓lb burger is smaller than a ¼lb because 3 is less than 4 something something metric system.
I could turn this around and say there is no sple way to tell -20°C oder +40°C in F. Who decides that the F Values are the exact points where humans feel uncomfortable when it can be some nearby C ones?
For someone that grew up using Fahrenheit, maybe. I have no desire nor need to learn it.
