They are right, no one ever does that. Their reasoning for the imperial system being practical is stupid though. The reason it can be practical is that its useful to have a unit the size of a foot sometimes. Metric is better in general, but there are aspects of the imperial system I would miss if I switched entirely. I just use imperial in casual conversation and metric for anything important.
Comment on A metric tonne (1000 kg) should be called a megagram (1 Mg).
yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee 1 year agoThere recently was a discussion on lemmy where several US citizens (one of them allegedly an engineer…) tried to explain to me that metric might be „more precise“ (? 😂) but the imperial system more practical, because „everybody knows what a foot is“. When I asked them to add feet to miles I got shouted at (in CAPS) that noone (ever) does that. 🤷♀️
sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Sigh, here we go again…
Yes YOU don’t do that. Because you can’t.
Everybody in Europe can and does so. There’s nothing arcane or mysterious about the metric system. I have no issues telling you how many litres of water go into a 50 x 50 x 200 cm aquarium, or a pool with a 3.5 m diameter and 80 cm height. Good luck doing that with your inches and feet and quarts and gallons.
There’s nothing „more useful“ about either a foot or a meter. Either you know how much it is or you don’t. Everybody knows what a meter is. For me it’s a large step. My arm from elbow to fingertips is 50 cm. Or 1/2 m… A sheet of paper is 30 cm (actually it’s 297 mm, but that’s another story), and so are rulers. Which, btw, is very close to a „foot“.
Your foot btw most likely is not as long as a „foot“, and a small woman’s size is easily 20% off. And no, that’s not „in the ballpark“.
sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yes YOU don’t do that. Because you can’t.
I won’t argue that, its a flawed measurement system. My goal isn’t to show you why imperial is so much better than metric, because its obviously not. That doesn’t mean imperial is never useful though.
There’s nothing „more useful“ about either a foot or a meter.
They can both do the same job, but its more convenient to have smaller units depending on what you’re measuring. I find the size of a foot to be convenient for measuring things in casual situations where accuracy and precision aren’t priorities.
Your foot btw most likely is not as long as a „foot“, and a small woman’s size is easily 20% off. And no, that’s not „in the ballpark“.
We don’t literally measure it with our feet, that’s just what its called.
yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee 1 year ago
but its more convenient to have smaller units depending on what you’re measuring.
See, that’s what apparently many people don’t understand: with metric you don’t have „larger or smaller units“. You have one unit and you scale it to your needs. It’s not like we have „the meter“ and „the centimeter“ and have no clue what’s in between. There’s absolutely nothing more convenient about having multiple units for the same physical property.
I find the size of a foot to be convenient for measuring things in casual situations where accuracy and precision aren’t priorities.
Again: There’s nothing more or less precise about metric or imperial. You have a mental image of a „foot“ the same way I have a mental image of a ruler or a sheet of paper, i.e. 30 cm.
I don’t really know what a litre is. I know what a beer bottle looks like, or a milk carton, the same way you know what a quart of milk looks like. Pour a quart on the floor and ask someone how much that is, they probably don’t know.
We don’t literally measure it with our feet, that’s just what its called.
Oh, I definitely had other people tell me imperial is „more human“ because a foot is the size of your foot and an inch is the size of the tip of your thumb.
fubbernuckin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wish decimeter was used more commonly. It kinda takes up the place of the imperial foot.
tunetardis@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Sometimes I think there was a missed opportunity in defining an easy conversion between inches and cm. It is 2.54 cm to 1". Why couldn’t it simply be 2.5? Then a 2x4 from the building supplier could simply be renamed a 5x10. 5.8x11.6 doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well.
My understanding is that the metre was inspired by nautical measures? So the distance from pole to equator along sea level is supposedly 10000 km. But that’s pretty approximate, and there is a more rigorous definition that involves the wavelength of a certain type of radiation. But that number is quite arbitrary-sounding. Couldn’t they have chosen it to line up with the imperial system at some level to aid migration? Anyway, that train has left the station and I’ll stop ranting now…
xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
At the time when the metric system was created, imperial units weren’t standardized at all, so if centimeters lined up with one definition of inch, they wouldn’t line up with the many other definitions anyway.
tunetardis@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Point taken. Reading up on it on wikipedia, I love the the legal definition from 1814, wherein one inch = “three grains of sound ripe barley being taken out the middle of the ear, well dried, and laid end to end in a row”.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I say that Metric is like color vision. Your can see things in whole new and easier ways. People in USC can’t understand what others see and insist things are just fine the way they are. Thus the “no one ever does that”, “you don’t need to know that”, etc.
sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It is true that no one ever does that though. That doesn’t mean its not a problem, but I’ve never seen anyone do it. If you need to do something like that and you have a brain, you use metric. Just because its flawed doesn’t mean imperial should be completely abolished though. What needs to stop is people thinking imperial is better than metric somehow. Aside from that, its just a weird flawed measurement system.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 year ago
We don’t use imperial in the US, we use US customary. Some units have different sizes in imperial. For example, a US pint is 16oz and an imperial pint is 20oz.
JungleJim@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That’s how they get you. They make the beer smaller.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I’ll tell you something I do as a woodworker a lot that metric isn’t great for: divide by powers of two, three or four. I’ve got some boards milled up 3/4" thick. I’m going to join them with a bridle joint, that means cutting the middle third out of one and the outer two thirds from the other. So each of the remaining “tongues” are each 1/4" thick. 3/4" is approximately 20mm. That’s a nice metric number, a multiple of 10. Let’s cut that same bridle joint in 20mm stock. What’s a third of 20mm? Can you come point to 6.6666mm on my metric tape measure here?
Don’t pretend base ten doesn’t do stupid things too.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Can you come point to 6.6666mm on my metric tape measure here?
Yes: For woodworkers, it’s identical to 6.5mm, accurately eyeballed at between 6 and 5mm. Don’t pretend you’re a machinist. Does your tape measure even have a vernier scale. Does it make satisfying clicks when measuring.
angrystego@lemmy.world 1 year ago
To be more precise, it should be rounded as 6.7 cm, accurately eyeballed at between 6.6 cm and 6.7 cm.
dandroid@dandroid.app 1 year ago
As an American, I understand that metric is better for a lot of things. It also would cost a metric fuck ton (ha!) of money to switch over, and it just really isn’t a priority when things work just fine for us here. It’s not like we are constantly running into problems that would be easier to solve by using metric, and the people in the few professions that do run into those problems frequently just use metric.
The original idea behind imperial units is actually quite nice. They used 12 inches in a foot because you could divide it in so many ways without using decimals. You can take 1/2 of it, 1/3, 1/4, and 1/6 without ever needing decimals. It’s great for mental math with small number. That obviously is no longer the most important thing anymore, as we all have calculators with us at all times, and we deal with much bigger numbers on average than they used 200 years ago.
We all still use 360° in a circle for this exact reason. It can be divided up in 22 different ways (excluding 1 and 360 as factors).
yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The original idea behind imperial units is actually quite nice. They used 12 inches in a foot because you could divide it in so many ways without using decimals. You can take 1/2 of it, 1/3, 1/4, and 1/6 without ever needing decimals.
You can measure 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4 of a meter, why wouldn’t you? Also, seriously, those common fractions aren’t that hard in decimal. Everybody knows that 125 g is 1/8 kg.
That’s not the issue. The issue is that it’s not consistent between imperial units, you have a zoo of different subdivisions between units. You have 12 inches in a foot, three foot in a yard etc pp.
The issue is it gets really unwieldy in multiplication, 1 cubic ft is how many cubic inches… 1728, how convenient.
Tell me how much is 1/6 cubic ft in inches? How many cups are that? There goes your mental math.
(It is also a common misconception that imperial is „duodecimal“. It’s not. It’s counting to 12 in decimal. If you had a proper duodecimal system, „12“ * „12“ would make 100 not 144.)
We all still use 360° in a circle
And you also say 180°, 45°, 720°. Not 1/2, 1/8, 2.
sfgifz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I saw that too, and many of them claimed they learn both Metric and Imperial British systems all the time. So this stood out now:
For the most part, we generally only use pounds, feet, miles. Everything else is a mystery. Even ounces, cups and gallons are some fucking magical mystery. Just follow the recipe.
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Lol, that sounds very much “as a black man”
I’ll tell you, most of us in the states would love a total switch to metric. We use it where is matters most, but we also have an aging population raised on lead has fumes that think anything they don’t know is “communism” or “wholeness” or whatever else the propaganda right spews. Those are the assholes that pretty much stop progress on anything.
I’m big into 3D printing, actually got into the same argument with another 3D printing guy…. And I’m like, literally EVERYTHING we do is in metric. Those damn hobby is metric.
I hate humanity
yA3xAKQMbq@lemm.ee 1 year ago
You mean the „engineer“? Well, what can I say, he was insisting his professor at uni taught him „a true engineer can work with every system“.
I mean yes, but the difference is one engineer is just happily pushing around decimals, the other one goes pale when you ask what 1/5th of a gallon in cubic inches is…
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Hehe, yea, I was poking fun at the “engineer”. There was a congressman a while ago that got caught posting right wing stuff on twitter from an alt account “as a black man” (dude was white of course”
Rusticus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You do realize that the US tried to switch to metric for 6 months in the 70s and it was a giant failure so we switched back, yes?
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You do realize asshole Republicans reverted before it could be more than implemented on a couple of highways
“Metric supporters argued the road signs were a crucial step in helping Americans get over any psychological blocks to switching measurement systems. But Republican Charles Grassley, then a congressman and now a senator from Iowa, killed proposed federal regulations that would have forced states to put up signs in kilometers.”
They literally locked putting up signs in both metric an Imperial
Also… remember my comment about old fucks raised on gas lead fumes…. Yea, the 70s……
DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Given that the 70’s was 50 years ago, most people don’t know the details of what happened. Other than a metric conversion was attempted.
It’s both surprising and not that it was killed by republicans. And given the current nationalist furor in the party, it doesn’t have a snow ball’s chance in hell of happening in the next decade. If it was proposed, again.
Astrealix@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean, I’d be very worried if 2023 wasn’t smarter than 1970 no matter the location.
CCDKP@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sometimes I like to think about the logistical challenges with a switch to metric. The one that always gives me pause is highway signs. Thinking about the monumental task of replacing every speed sign, distance sign, and mile marker across the country in any timely period makes my head hurt.
It could certainly be done, and is probably easier than I think with all the state DoTs working independently on it especially over time. We have a lot of road with a lot of signs.
JungleJim@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That’s a good point, but we don’t have to even fully replace them. I admit I don’t know the name of the technology but I see many street signs or construction signs that have basically a printed metal sticker slapped over the old information.
TheIllustrativeMan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think the bigger one is the construction industry.
2"x4" studs. 4’x8’ plywood. 16" O.C.
Changing to 44x95, 1219x2438, 406 O.C doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We could switch over to the metric equivalents (like 1250x1250 or 600 O.C.), but that would mean switching out machinery and would break a lot of standards.