Imperial Wastes So Much Time
Imperial Wastes So Much Time
165 comments
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I'm an American and every last bit of my shop is metric. It is the superior unit of measurement in every aspect. I don't bother with imperial at all. If I have to list dimensions online in imperial, just multiply mm x 25.4 which gives me inches. That's as far as Ill go into inches and feet.
I've said this before and Ill say it again, the US was robbed of the superior unit of measurement.
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So, from my perspective, your experience gives me the exact opposite view. The fact is: no one is stopping us. Anyone in American can use metric any time they want. We use Imperial a significant amount of time because it's useful. Feet and inches are related to body parts. Kilometers are too small for our giant country. I design surgical tools, and I use metric. I design buildings, and I use feet and inches.
I don't really think it's slowing us down to have more than one system.
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Kilometers are too small for our giant country.
Fortunately for NASA, space is actually smaller than the USA. Otherwise km would be totally unworkable.
I'm guessing that you have to use meters instead of yards when designing tall buildings? Yards would be too small for most skyscrapers.
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Kilometers are too small for our giant country.
Kilometers aren't the biggest measurement in metric though.
It goes: Kilometer x1000= Megameter x1000= Gigameter x1000= Terameter. A Terameter is about 1012 meter
Just as it goes smaller like: Milimeter /1000= Micrometer /1000= Nanometer /1000= Picometer
And even those are still not the biggest or smallest measurements possible in metric.
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I don't really think it's slowing us down to have more than one system
Say that to the Mars Climate Orbiter
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Lol. Dude, with all due respect, did you skip breakfast or something? First, body parts? Take a drink of water, please. You're dehydrated. Also, although I agree imperial isn't completely useless, one of its strengths is not because the size of the contental United States. It's not like miles and kilometers are orders of magnitude different when measuring an identical distance. Lightyears and astronomical units are terrible units to use to describe a drive from LA to NYC for this reason, but is it really that big if a deal between choosing miles and kilometers? I don't see it that way.
The main reason why I use metric with my work is because I commonly deal in millimeters / sub-inches. If I used inches, everything would be shitty fractions and I hate fractions. To me, metric is just cleaner when increasing or decreasing magnitudes. Which I generally stay within cm and mm.
Within industrial applications, such a building a structure in the US, yeah, it makes sense to stick ti imperial because it is indeed the national unit of measurement. But outside that reason, I don't find much of a benefit. Coincidentally, I moved off grid 3 weeks ago and am building a cabin way out in the woods. Because its just me and I plan to stay here until my end, I'll definitely use metric. If I was just developing a place I intended to flip, I'd use Imperial singularly because I'm in the US.
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Thank you for your efforts!
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What temperature is the shop kept at?
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Fahrenheit. Switching to Kelvin soon, tho. For shop temp accuracy!
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Yeah but can we talk about time?
Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time. ...It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion. … —Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living.As quoted in the GNU coreurils documentation for date input formats
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The units are complicated because our world is complicated. The moon orbits the earth in a certain interval, the earth orbit the sun and the earth revolves around itself. Those are the major points of reference but none of them line up.
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Best of all, none of those natural reference values are constant. They drift gradually, and lunar months won’t be 30 days forever just like a day won’t be 24 hours in the future.
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The way we split them is still purely arbitrary though. We could have metric time that uses multiples of 10 just by adjusting the duration of a second accordingly and adjusting how we divide time in a day.
Days of the calendar would be more challenging. But it's still possible to make something much more workable I'm sure of it.
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When the metric system was defined and adopted during the French revolution they changed the calendar as well.
Months were changed to be 30 days each with an extra 5-6 days at the end of the year, weeks were 10 days long, days were 10 hours of 100 minutes, each minute lasted 100 seconds.
Unfortunately it did not stick and the decimal time system was reverted.
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Being purposefully stupid and arrogant about it is the single most American thing.
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Then there's my favorite cursed unit: the kip! 1 kip=1000 lbs. "Kip" is short for "kilo-pounds." It's a unit used frequently in American civil and structural engineering. And it is so deliciously cursed.
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Fun fact: the SI (international system of units) actually defines a multiplier "Ki", but it is not a factor of 1000. A Kisomething is 1024 something. As in 1KiB = 1024B (Kilobytes resp. Bytes).
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It's also about 31 slugs.
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Back in the early days of telephones at&t used kft to measure lines. Yes that is kilofoot
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One of the many failures of American public education system that I was subjected to. It's speaks volumes about how normalized exceptionalism is in this country.
"Oh, the measurement standard the rest of the world uses? You don't need to learn that. You're an American, so people from other countries will just accomodate you because they want to be like us."
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One of the most annoying things in the world are American websites that claim to sell internationally but they only offer USD and all provided measurements are in American imperial.
Right up there with online stores that only have boxes for "state" and "zip code" even if the selected country doesn't use those.
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Americans are really falling behind these day in all the metrics 😂
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We actually use both. Imperial is easier to break into 3rds, but can still break down into other bases easily without any irrational numbers. Metric is more useful for science, but my mom who does landscaping prefers Imperial for her designs because it’s not stuck in base-10.
Europeans are the ones who refuse to learn more than one system lol
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Just came here to nit-pick that the metric prefix for 103 is k and not K.
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Case in point: Platinum melts around 2kK.
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Growing up in the Metric environment, I only have to deal with the Imperial system very rarely before the Internet. But later, I found out there's a whole country that only use Imperial, and that they almost always demand you convert your system to the one they understand, and almost never bothered with Metric when they write anything. But then again, I found out that they also use units that are totally novel. I just have to accept that this is the character of them, and continue using Metric.
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It's because they believe they're so exceptional that everything that works for the rest of the world doesn't work for them.
That includes not only the metric system but also things like healthcare, student debt and gun control.
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Probably. Because their understanding of metric is next to none. So they don't even know what to convert it to. We also often take for granted with that we grow up with.
It wasn't until I was 25 that I realized woodworking and sewing, isn't part of the normal elementary school curriculum abroad.
It's far from easy for someone that grew up in a different system to get a good reference of what different units feel like. It's the kind of change you need multiple new generations for.
The only reference Americans have for metric is 9mm
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The only reference Americans have for metric is 9mm
Way to show your ignorance. We also buy our soda in liters.
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There is no country that only uses Imperial. Americans use grams for weed. And technically what the US uses is called US Customary. Some units are different from Imperial. Funny thing is both Imperial and US Customary are legally defined in metric.
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Middle Earth?
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In the US, we should make things even more confusing to anger the metric folks. I propose we redefine the "foot" every four years. The length of the foot will always correspond to the actual measured foot length of the current US president.
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the fact that you think this will anger metric folks who already don't make sense of your dumb system rather than ruin many aspects of your country ... uh ... never mind, you're already ruining many aspects of country. ignore what I was going to say. carry on.
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What if we defined a foot such that a cubic food of some good, say potatoes or something, is a specific amount of money. So it's tied to inflation.
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We should bring back hogsheads, rods, fathoms, etc.
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IIRC some of those crazy units are still referenced in certain laws of old...
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What a wondefull idea!
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Ugh. Kelvingram again.
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💔
but at least there's a space
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It annoys me so much that a small decision could have had me growing up with metric.
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who the fuck are these absolute twats that are simping over a system of measurement? good for you, your governance made a good choice, but it was hardly like OP invented it or was responsible for the adoption, so whoop de fuckin' doo. or Le Whoop if you must convert.
we don't like imperial, it's not like you'll find people (outside hicksville or maga) claiming to defend it's superiority.
and get off your silly pretensions, for all your metric elegance the UK is still measuring shit in stones and miles.
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Mad?
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Nah, about what? I didn't make the decisions. you didn't either, so if you're proud, that's fucking dumb too.
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Well the UK isn't in Europe anymore. They moved away a couple years ago. Besides the best system is the French Revolutionary System
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The UK isn't in the EU anymore. As far as I know their island didn't drift away from our continental plate.
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hon hon hon mes oui yeah whatever
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They use a blend of metric and imperial as do we.
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the secret of the sauce is just the right blend. give them predictable units for most things then hit them with the hogshead when they get comfortable
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we don’t like imperial, it’s not like you’ll find people (outside hicksville or maga) claiming to defend it’s superiority.
Every time metric vs imperial comes up on the internet there will be a gazillion Americans defending their system, claiming it is more "human" or some similar sort of nonsense. So yes, are a lot of Americans who will defend its alleged superiority.
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Every time metric vs imperial comes up on the internet there will be a gazillion Americans defending their system, claiming it is more “human” or some similar sort of nonsense. So yes, are a lot of Americans who will defend its alleged superiority.
pfft ok bud. there are schmucks in the UK that love stones. it's a tiny minority on both sides.
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Amerifats cant get over their imperialist england brain to work in tandem with rest of the world. It creates just enough division and tribality between the world the US to justify its colonial nature and settlement enterprise in the americas.
You cant bury your disgusting history.
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Yes, the US is trying to sow discord in the world with it's choice of measurement system in order to further its imperialist agenda.
Nevermind the documented instances of US government military intervention and collusion with far right-wing groups to disrupt popular leftist movements and governments across the world. It's the measurement system that's the problem.
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You are being insidious. This also contributes to the main directives. It wasnt JUST THIS.
People dont hate Trump because he is orange. But it definitely doesnt fucking help it either.
Or teams dont choose green as their team color because it helps them win more. But having these features helps with the morale.
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Being a mechanical engineer in the US constantly switching between both systems really sucks. And for much more than just length and temperature
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This could’ve been dealt with decades ago if people weren’t afraid of change.
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If the brits were able to mostly switch in the 20th century the americans should have been more than able to.
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And if the weights didn't fall into the ocean.
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How many British thermal units does it take to heat up a slug of water 1 degree Celsius?
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I like metric weight for cooking (on the rare occasion I make something that involves careful measuring, and for my bread making) and MILES can fuck right off, km are fine for measuring long distance. And fine with meters, cm for short distance.
But I do like how feet are 12 inches, because 12 is so evenly divisible, and like that a gallon splits in half and half again and again until you get cups. It's like RAM,
Cup is 8 oz
Pint is 16 oz
Quart is 32 oz
Half Gallon is 64 oz
Gallon is 128 oz.
That doubling sequence is satisfying.
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Your 16 oz pints are a pathetic 455ml. Europeans have 500ml.
Meanwhile a true UK pint is 568ml.
You can see why we cling to Imperialism.
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Damn Tucker Carlson must’ve stumbled upon this post. Someone should tell him that Russians use metric.
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Should be pretty easy to learn, right? I mean, that's the whole point.
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except for intuition formed from a lifetime of daily usage
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We were taught it in my rural red state elementary school in the '80s. Maybe because metrification seemed like a more real possibility, I guess.
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Can anyone with a deeper understanding of the history of the metric system explain why a gram is the base unit of weight, and a litre the base unit of volume?
I thought the foundation of the system was that a kilogram is the weight of a litre of water. But then why not name them 1 thing = 1 thing rather than 1000x a thing = 1 thing.
And yes I've had four cups of coffee and no sleep today.
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That’s an interesting question that I’d never thought about before.
I asked chatGPT, which predictably bullshitted me and said they’d decided grams made more sense than kilograms for scientific lab work.
But then I searched and found this from the user tomalator on Reddit:
“When the French were developing the metric system, they suggested the unit be called a grave (pronounced grav) being the mass of 1L of water (1000 cm3)
The French at this time being in the middle of a revolution against the rich notice that it sounded a lot like the word Graf, being a word for Duke or Earl, and they wanted to avoid affiliating with the nobility, so they changed the measurement to be the mass of 1mL of water (1 cm3) and called it the gramme
They then noticed that it was inconvenient to use a mass unit so small, so they changed back to the 1L of water definition, but kept the name gramme for the base, and threw out the word grave in favor of the kilogramme.
And that's why the kilogram is the base SI unit and not the gram. I had the exact same question when I learned the SI unites.”
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First they defined the meter and then one litre was defined as one dm^3.
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4 cups, you have had a quart of coffee, sir ;)
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American exceptionalism (& imperialism) at it's finest
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They’re really proving it in the comments. Maga loves imperial the most.
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This thread is full of middle schoolers who don’t realize that you can measure things in whatever system you want, regardless of country. The whole premise of this circlejerk is faulty.
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You can but there are real examples where mixing units results in failure. NASA lost a 125 million dollar mars probe in 1999 because JPL and NASA use metric but Lockheed Martin added acceleration data in American imperial units.
It might be a circle jerk but it is also best practice to use a standard system and there's really only one holdout on not using that system. I say this as an American who wishes people would just use metric because it's just easier unless you just fucking love fractions of an inch.
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anyone can do whatever on their own, but if it affects anyone else than that one person its not just that one person's business. I cant see the insistence of using imperial system as anything else than america has used it in the past, and therefore its american system and because america is the best it must be the best system to use and to claim anything else is to hate america.
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Also 1L water ~ 1kg
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And 1000 cm³ = 1L
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BUT THIS IS HOW WE ALWAYS DID IT
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I have a chip on my shoulder about the metric system as it appears in sci-fi writing.
It drives me nuts that in books like The Expanse (and I think the Bobiverse and Andy Wier's works) that the writer will call distances in "thousands/millions of kilometers".
Really feels more reasonable to just go full send and call them megameters and gigameters, but maybe that's just my American non-metric mind trying to force full use of a system in a way those born to it don't actually do.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
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It's certainly a good observation. I would agree that a more practical way of measuring the vast distances is to up the scale. Giga, Terra, whatever.
A kilometer in space is nothing. It must be the equivalent of saying "it's only a million millimeter drive away"
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There we go imperial-y again, with distance to sun, distance based on angle to gobbledigook, and what not.
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Everytime I see one of these posts I have to make the same comment. The US is metric, everywhere that it matters. In the military, in the medical field, and in the scientific field. The ONLY reason we haven't converted every other part of our lives to metric is that our country is 50 times the size of the average European country. Do you know how expensive it would be to replace the infrastructure we've built and maintained over the past 200 years? The tax payers could not handle that burden, and it would require every state to agree to the terms of the change for a total conversion.
At this point, it is just part of our identity. It would be like asking the French to eat day old bread. They could, but why?
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Then why are all your english content in freaking fantasy units???
Every country switched at one time in history, the longer you wait the more expensive it becomes.
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One, they aren't fantasy units— this is real life, son.
Two, the country was built on imperial, so the trades use imperial to maintain the country. Everyone in the US grows up learning in imperial, and then learns metric when they get into physics and chemistry.
Three, I addressed the fact that WE CAN NOT AFFORD TO SWITCH. It does not matter if it is going to be more expensive in the future. We can't afford it NOW.
I understand the spirit of your reply. This is just the reality of what having 50 different states, who can't agree on anything and are loosely tied together by an over-arching government, is like.
There are 27 counties in the European Union, and they are filled with reasonable people in government(for the most part). We have 50 states that are filled with greedy little assholes who will do everything in their power to gain more power to leverage in a bid to destroy what they deem "the enemy", so they can make even more money and gain more power.
We are never going to convert wholesale to metric. We can't even agree, as a country, that poor people are people, at a government scale. That is entirely motivated by profit and nothing more.
It simply does not pay to switch to metric.
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It's also that imperial uses body measurements for basic stuff. Your foot is about a foot long, so you can pace off distances. One yard is about the length from your collarbone to the opposite wrist, so I can roughly measure fabric quickly. From your fingertip to the crook of your thumb is about five inches, and the knuckles on your fingers are about an inch apart.
I used to do industrial embroidery at an immigrant-owned shop, and the boss switched from metric to imperial because measuring a couple inches with your fingers is faster than finding a meter stick and measuring centimeters exactly. When you've got multiple inches in your margin for error, there is no need for the precision of metric, and the speed of imperial just makes more sense.
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Metric is useful but it lacks enough units for everyday use. Like milimeter is useful for measuring somethings, and meter is useful for somethings but not having a foot equivalent makes it less useful. I'd rather say 4 feet than 1.3 meters. Same with grams and kilos; not having an ounce is an oversight. I'd rather order an 8 ounce burger than a 226gram burger. Mililiters and liters are useful but not having a fl ounce makes it clumsier.
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Your preferences mean nothing. You prefer what's familiar, just like everyone else.
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I'm familiar with Metric AND Imperial and not just because the US uses a blend but because both science and science fiction have been interests of mine since early childhood. Americans just hate syllables. 4 feet is two syllables while 1.3 meters is 5 syllables. Hell, quarts are almost the same thing as liters just with fewer syllables , same as yards and meters.
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Definitely not. Anything below the meter is usually measured in cm; Metalworkers and engineers use mm there, and it's not an issue. Your four feet are our 120cm (not 130!), or maybe 1.2m, and it is not "odd". I'm 175cm or 1.75m high, both are commonly used.
Same with weight: Up to and around a kilogram it's just grams. And you won't find a "226gram" burger here, just to cuddle your ounces. Here, that burger would be 250g, plain and simple.
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What even is a fluid ounce? And what feet, yours, mine?
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I may be not accustomed to US lifestyle but why in the fuck anyone would order a burger by the weight of the patty? Can you order 7,5 ounces? 12?
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A foot equivalent? You mean like a decimeter?
An ounce equivalent? You mean like a dekagram?
Metric has everything you claim it doesn't. And much more than your little imperial brain can comprehend.
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I don't know if you're aware of this but Metric only works in powers of ten. I'm suggesting that's a weakness.
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My favorite fact about the metric system that blows imperial believer's minds is that if you take a 1cm thick tube you put 1 liter of water it weights 1kilogram and it it 1 meter tall the measure.
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So you admit your precious meter isn't up to the task of being decided by three and you have to find ways to compensate for its inadequacy.
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Metre*
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As a brit, the only thing I care about is the extra 68ml I get in my pint.
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Instead of fighting over the best arbitrary unit system we should all sit together and create a truly logical system that makes conversions - even between units - as simple as possible.
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xkcd 927
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Why should we? There are only 3 countries that don't use metric.
Why should we accommodate to something less than 5% of the population uses? Especially if it is so wildly inconsistent in every form it takes?
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Finance and hours, please?
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Please divide one of your fancy meters in a third. I'll wait here for you to finish repeating the number 3.
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If you live in a metric country you'll quickly find that nothing is sold in 1 meter length, but in steps of 300mm (wood for example).
300mm divided by 2 is 150mm. 300mm divided by 3 is 100mm. 300mm divided by 4 is 75 mm. 300mm divided by 5 is 60mm. 300mm divided by 6 is 50mm.Even when you buy something advertised as "1-foot" you'll find it measures 300mm, because we don't buy a foot of wood here, and when you divide it by 3 you get exactly 100mm; which easily converts with any other metric measurement.
Additionally, Imperial measurements are no more, or no less, exact than metric measures. Because Imperial measures are defined using metric measures in the first place.
Edit: Also this argument would carry more weight if Imperial measures were base 12 across the board, and it isn't.
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As a carpenter and lover of math, and since we're using mm and wood, cutting a 300mm length of wood equally in 3, results in 3 pieces of wood that are 100mm less the thickness of the blade.
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Unlike Americans, we aren't actually afraid of decimals.
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You should, rounding errors can be a real problem
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That first diagram looks exactly like the dumbass step functions in my company
165 comments
But it's really easy. Wanna know how many inches are in a mile? One inch is 0.0254 m. One mile is 1609.344 m. 1609.344 / 0.0254 is 63360. There.
But what if there are no inches in that mile, only yards? Or parsec? Oh, wait...
or just eagle elbows
i tooked astronomy in college a while ago, to know how long is 1 parsec.
I've never wanted to know how many of any unit are in a mile. It's just something I've never had reason to care about. So there's 1000 meters in a kilometer. That's just trivia to me. There's no need to know that.
I always assumed 1km = 0.6 miles because all all of the car guys yapping about 0-100 and 0-60. Good enough, tbh. Inch is 2.5cm, and there are 12 of them in a foot for some reason. Pint is slightly less than half a liter, pound is slightly less than half a kilo, and anyone mentioning stones gets stoned to death. Simple enough.
Just wait until you try to understand American cooking recipes. Cups everywhere! My favorite was "A cup of spinach", without any mentioning if they were talking about fresh spinach (losely or densily packed) or cooked/frozen one.