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.
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 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.
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
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The only thing I still like Fahrenheit for is temperature. There's a wider range for the human livable temperature, so you get more persision. For everything else metric all the way.
And yes, it's 100% my American brain can't figure it out in Celcius no matter how hard I try lmao. 10's are chill, 20's are nice, 30's sind heiß. But in the end, I end up thinking Fahrenheit and going from there every time.
I feel like this is my wheel house.
There are so many baseless radixals in the comments.
It's easy to talk about converting over but I imagine the great majority of those calling for absolute conversion towards metric is completely ignorant about the immense scale of imperial hardware (fasteners nuts and bolts) used globally because of aerospace. It's easy to change the numbers on a piece of paper. It's not so easy to respec a commercial/military aircraft from inch to metric. Not only is the final component changed but almost every legacy tooling that has existed to manufacturer and assemble such goods. And trust me the world isn't all CNC machining as you might think it is.
I'd like to phase out of inches eventually but somethings are prohibitively expensive to convert without starting fresh from the ground up. Hard to justify such a "backwards" step to shareholders.
Tl;Dr inches is here to stay whether you like it or not.
It's not entirely without logic. Base 12 is actually better that base 10 for a start, as it allows for a lot more fractions that have clean representations, so 12 inches in a foot is fine. The next thing is that people seem to think we have all of these strange units with strange conversions, when in reality we have 3 units for short distances, and then a seperate unit for long distances. 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and then nobody cares how long a mile is in terms of feet or yards. Once you realize that the mile is not even really part of the same measuring system as inches, feet and yards, the weird conversion makes sense. We exclusively use miles to talk about long distances above 0.1 miles, and then yards are used below 500 yards (which has an overlap of 324 yards). And then for the logic, it is entirely based on actual human scale shit. A foot is called a foot because it is roughly the size of your foot. A yard is approximately how long one stride is. Saying something is 100 yards away means it is approximate 100 steps away. Obviously there will be a bit of variance for how accurate that will be for any given person (and children will have to base it off of an adult obviously), but because it is based more on human things it is more useful for measuring human scale things. It was designed to not use decimals or large numbers because humans don't comprehend those very well.
Every time anyone talks about this, I feel obligated to inform them: there's also a counting system that's not based on ten, and it's way superior. Do people know about it? Most don't. The Wikipedia page stupidly calls it the "ten-plus-two" system, and there have been heated arguments there with the dumbasses who refuse to change it to the logical name. That's how stupidly-biased people are towards the ten-based system.
You make a "metric" measurement system based on 12-based counting and then everyone wins. Everyone. It'll never happen of course.
I use imperial everyday at work building stuff I don't really need complex math at all in my life, and barely measurements outside of what is easily done in my head or by eye. Temperature I rarely use in a meaningful way.The two aren't mutually exclusive in practice in your lives apparently. This is a non issue altogether. More people using metric is the best argument, but it's probably more about how dumb Americans are more than anything.
There are some places that do use a base 12 number system.
Again, I wasn't defending it, just explaining it.
