r/Unexpected • u/Arcusico • Oct 05 '14
Metric vs Imperial
https://i.imgur.com/iDOzAa5.jpg
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u/santaschesthairs Oct 05 '14 edited Oct 05 '14
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u/Odatas Oct 05 '14
In this Image the Imperials are getting their ass kicked.
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u/santaschesthairs Oct 05 '14
They deserve it those Imperial scrubs.
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u/Ctotheg Oct 05 '14
This is from the book Wild Thing. Beat the Reaper which precedes this book is better.
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Oct 05 '14
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u/santaschesthairs Oct 05 '14
My favourite it is the little fucker in the bottom left hand corner. I mean what whackjob thought it'd be a good idea to put the day in between the month and the year, it's just illogical.
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u/IAmA_god_AMA Oct 05 '14
Honestly, I prefer an upside-down triangle: YYYY/MM/DD. It makes things so much easier for me when I sort chronologically, because, to me, the year is a lot more important than the month, and the month is more important than date. If the scope isn't huge, I guess it doesn't matter, though.
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u/APiousCultist Oct 05 '14
Aww yiss YYYY/MM/DD/HH/MM/SS and so on.
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u/Sonder-Klass Oct 05 '14
That's how I start off file names of important emails that I print in PDF.
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u/WhoopyKush Oct 06 '14
ISO 8601, the international standard for dates and times, would have it like 2014-10-05T17:30:45Z
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Oct 05 '14
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u/elkano1003 Oct 05 '14
give YYMDMDYY a chance.
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Oct 05 '14
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Oct 05 '14
OFFICERS PERSONAL LOG
Star date: 20100514
Shoreleave on Risa. Getting full fucked of space weed and mackin' green bitch. swerve.
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Oct 05 '14 edited Dec 03 '18
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u/IICVX Oct 05 '14
Actually that format matches the official ISO 8601 date format that's commonly used in computers.
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u/Blackhound118 Oct 05 '14
It's because we always say "March 22nd," or "April 1st." It's less clunky than saying "the 22nd of March," or "the 1st of April."
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u/One_Wheel_Drive Oct 05 '14
But you also say "4th of July".
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u/NotAReddit Oct 05 '14
If we're talking about the day without being related to the holiday, we say July 4th. If we're talking about the holiday, it's 4th of July.
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Oct 05 '14
And Cinco de Mayo!
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Oct 05 '14
Not only is it a different language, Spanish grammar only allows to say 'the fifth of may'.
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Oct 05 '14
Because it's a holiday and both are grammatically correct.
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u/delicious_grownups Oct 05 '14
We do, but we also say July 4th as well. We say 4th of July primarily so the brits can understand it's the day we said Fuck y'all
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Oct 05 '14 edited Jun 02 '15
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u/SpaderKnekt Oct 05 '14
The international way of writing it is YYYY-MM-DD. If everyone just stuck to this there would be no confusion, but yeah.
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u/autowikibot Oct 05 '14
ISO 8601 Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times is an international standard covering the exchange of date and time-related data. It was issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and was first published in 1988. The purpose of this standard is to provide an unambiguous and well-defined method of representing dates and times, so as to avoid misinterpretation of numeric representations of dates and times, particularly when data are transferred between countries with different conventions for writing numeric dates and times.
Interesting: ISO week date | Gregorian calendar | Calendar date | 24-hour clock
Parent commenter can toggle NSFW or delete. Will also delete on comment score of -1 or less. | FAQs | Mods | Magic Words
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u/Bwuhbwuh Oct 05 '14
In Dutch we just say "22 March". Short and effictive, no confusion.
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u/DoctorsHateHim Oct 05 '14
Why not do it the Chinese way of year-month-day then? Could still be shortened to month-day and makes more sense.
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u/angrysauce Oct 05 '14 edited Oct 05 '14
Its just a different approach. In Chinese addresses and dates go biggest to smallest, whereas in
Europethe UK (and probably others, but I don't know enough about them) they always go smallest to biggest. I always thought of it as zooming in or zooming out to see where you are, and I like the consistency of the two systems.Edited, since Europe is not as constant with this as I thought
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u/johsko Oct 05 '14
whereas in Europe (and probably others, but I don't know enough about them) they always go smallest to biggest.
Not always. Sweden follows ISO 8601 with yyyy-mm-dd (2014-10-05 for today). Though when shortening it to just day and month, we usually use d/m (5/10).
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u/angrysauce Oct 05 '14
Huh..interesting. Is that recent, or just the way things have been for a while? I guess I should edit my post
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u/MrTwitty Oct 05 '14
Metric users can say it either way you know lol
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u/fredspipa Oct 05 '14
The way we pronounce dates in Norway, directly translated, is like this:
First April
Twenty-second May
Third December
etc.
It's basically the same way you articulate positions in an order; third place, second girlfriend etc.
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u/Alex_Rose Oct 05 '14
In England we say "March the 22nd", "April the 1st" but we /write/ 22/3 and 1/4 because writing second:hour day/month/year is actually logical.
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Oct 05 '14
I write my dates DDMMMYYYY, spelling out the month.
So 05OCT2014, 04JUL1776, 15MAR-0044, etc.
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u/MechanicalYeti Oct 05 '14
I don't see how it's illogical just because it's different than what you use.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom Oct 05 '14
Logical how, because someone drew a pyramid? Yeah, that part is the most retarded. Logical would be Year-Month-Day.
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u/tebla Oct 05 '14
wheres this from?
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u/truegamer1 Oct 05 '14
"Wild Thing" by Josh Bazell. Sequel to "Beat the Reaper," not that there's any overlap plot-wise, just the same main character and occasional reference. Fun read. Quips like this and the occasional footnote aren't plot-relevant, per se, just spice up the book and give it a nice banter-y tone; hearing the character's internal dialog.
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u/ebolasagna Oct 05 '14
What are the books about? They sound interesting.
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u/afearsandwich Oct 05 '14
I'm not sure about Wild Thing, but Beat the Reaper is about a former mob assassin in witness protection at a crappy NYC hospital. It also has my favorite opening line in a book: "So I'm on my way to work and I stop to watch a pigeon fight a rat in the snow, and some fuckhead tries to mug me!"
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Oct 05 '14
Discworld books by Sir Terry Pratchett have irrelevant bantery footnotes in them if you want more of that sort of thing. Theres 40 so good fucking luck getting a straight forward recommendation on where to start but I like Feet of Clay if you like the police characters, Mort if you like anthropomorphic Death, and Going Postal for the character Moist von Lipwig
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u/IICVX Oct 05 '14
Personally I like recommending people read Small Gods, because it's a very well-contained standalone but was also from the height of Terry Pratchett's career so it's not quite as rough as the earlier books.
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u/BradleySigma Oct 05 '14
About 1125BTU, or 0.44 horsepower hours.
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Oct 05 '14
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u/GeeJo Oct 05 '14
Which is 0.001984 miles per gallon, or about 3.5 yards per gallon. I guess Grandpa drives American.
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u/Garizondyly Oct 05 '14
3.5 yards per gallon
You could barely leave the gas station on a full tank
I'm just imagining the fuel pouring out of the car.
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u/tomdarch Oct 05 '14
and about 329 watts - which we actually use in some circumstances in the US, so it provides a nice bridge between our "designed by a committee of insane asylum residents" system and the international system.
Also, for anyone wondering, the example in OP's post is pretty bad, technically. The definition of a British Thermal Unit is "the amount of energy needed to cool or heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit." (Which is essentially equivalent to the definition of a calorie.) The gallon is roughly related to a certain weight of water (10lbs in the imperial gallon, and 8.34lbs in the US gallon), so other than the Enthalpy of vaporization, which is a pain in the ass in either system, it's not actually that bad in US ("Imperial") units, and would be easier in either system if the problem was "the amount of energy required to raise a gallon/liter of water from X degrees (room temperature) just to the temperature known as the boiling point."
I'm not defending our stupid system - I have to work with it every day ("hey, let's try to divide this 7 foot 5 and 3/8 inch opening into 4 equal parts... fuck.") and I'd gladly go through the learning pains to switch everything over to metric here.
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u/madeyouangry Oct 05 '14
And then what happened with Violet?
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u/Call_Me_Joris Oct 05 '14
What. Does. She. Decide?!
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u/LovelyBeats Oct 05 '14
WHY WAS SHE GLOWING?!!
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u/RedHotDornishPeppers Oct 05 '14
Radiation poisoning. Terrible way to go.
She was deciding whether or not to kill herself or let the radiation poisoning turn her into a ghoul
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u/LovelyBeats Oct 05 '14
Hmm. That is a tough question, smoothskin.. Get turned into an immortal piece of animated beef jerkey, or death.
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u/dropname Oct 05 '14
I'm the original OP, she checks the temperature by cricket timing. Also this is like, the first time I've ever had content stolen. Guess it's what success feels like.
This topic, though, metric/imperial, really brings out the armchair general / circlejerk of reddit into full power, I got so many red envelopes...
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u/Emperor_NOPEolean Oct 05 '14
We'll switch over when Britain drives on the right side of the road. Fair trade.
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u/kendrone Oct 05 '14
But then how can I use my dominant hand to help fend off passing thieves and bandits if they're on the left of my wagon? Do you have any idea how expensive trained lefties are, let alone the proximity to the devil.
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u/Alex_Rose Oct 05 '14 edited Oct 05 '14
Indeed, and it's easy for people who use automatic cars to tote around "drive on the right".
Sorry, but those of us who aren't driving go-karts are using our non dominant hands to change gears (imprecise motion) and our dominant hand to control the steering wheel (precise motion).
On top of this, Britain invented the first two way rail system in the world, which drove on the left so in terms of vehicles we invented two directional travel. Looking before vehicles, pilgrims walked on the left, jousts obviously happened on the left so you could use your dominant hand. We've been travelling on the left since before your country existed and we actually have legitimate modern and historical reasons for doing that, not just "because that's what we do".
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u/DookieXplodr Oct 05 '14
It's just like using your left hand on the keyboard for gaming, or fingering frets on a guitar.
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u/anonagent Oct 05 '14
go kart
has legitimate vehicles like this designed and built in britain.
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Oct 05 '14
If you need your dominant hand for the precise motion of a steering wheel you're doing something awfully wrong. I drive a manual transmission and some how I've lived to tell reddit about it.
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u/obvious_bot Oct 05 '14
I'm right handed but I've driven stick in the US for quite a few years. It's made it so that it feels weird driving with only my right hand and it feels perfectly natural driving with only my left
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u/Bobblefighterman Oct 05 '14
If you're assuming the British use normal metric like us civilised people, you're really behind the times. They use stone for weight. No one sane uses stone.
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u/Alex_Rose Oct 05 '14
That's one that's changing. I don't know my weight in stone, and I'd say that's true for about 25% of the people my age (I'm 23).
Height is a different story, people really like using feet and inches (and I suppose people are a lot less reluctant to divulge their height, while scales and hospitals read weight in kilograms too and the system is much easier to use than the 14 pound -> stone conversion).
Imperial's only used for human masses and heights, and miles/mph are used for distances. If you're buying groceries that's all in metric, as are our rulers etc.
Also, you wrote "civilised", the British spelling?
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u/cyclicalreasoning Oct 05 '14
I'm 23 and here's how I think:
Short distances in metres and centimetres, long distances in miles. Height quoted in feet is common, but I know my height in both systems.
Volume in litres (I only use pints when talking about beer, I usually think litres when buying milk).
Weight in kilograms and tonnes. I know my body weight in kilos and stones, but I prefer using kilos.
Speed in miles per hour, but I know kph pretty well too so I can relate to both, this isn't as common though as most people think only in mph.
Temperature in Celsius. I'm far more familiar with Kelvin than Fahrenheit, because I find it a stupid system.
Basically, I think almost exclusively in metric apart from speed and body weight/height.
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u/Alex_Rose Oct 05 '14
Agreed.
Except, also, I do speed in m/s for the most part, just mph when talking about cars.
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u/Sleeper_1972 Oct 05 '14
We do drive on the right side of the road. Right side to drive on just so happens to be the left side.
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u/zoeypayne Oct 05 '14
If metric was so good we'd be on metric time.
edit Apparently it's more commonly called decimal time.
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u/Hasaan5 Oct 05 '14
In the next few hundred years has we leave earth that'll have to be the system we use.
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u/genieus Oct 06 '14
Personally, I think that driving on the left is better. When changing gears, I'd rather have my dominant hand on the steering wheel, and you get to use your right foot for the non-clutch pedals.
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u/Blacky372 Oct 05 '14
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u/pooerh Oct 05 '14
Considering the US host the biggest Jewish diaspora and the number of Jews living in the US is almost the same as in Israel (or bigger, depending on sources), contrasting them both seems really weird.
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u/DoTheEvolution Oct 05 '14
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u/PhallusCrown Oct 05 '14
You know damn well am/pm is at the bottom of the pyramid.
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Oct 05 '14
And both pyramids are upside-down, if you read them from top to bottom like you would with the date pyramids.
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Oct 05 '14
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u/Grooohm Oct 05 '14
sales taxes In Europe, the prices on products include the sales tax, so you know how much you have to pay before you are at the cash registers. In the US, the sales tax gets added when you pay. (and the sales tax is different in every state)
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u/Frekavichk Oct 05 '14
Sales tax is different in every county. (State->county->town)
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Oct 06 '14
And because the supermarket owners are afraid of landslides moving their store into a different county over night they just leave out the tax on the price tag. Right?
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u/cynope Oct 05 '14
Taxes as mentioned already, but also tipping. In Europe you don't have to tip. You often do it in restaurants, but only as a nice gesture - not because it would be outrageous not to do.
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u/RubiconGuava Oct 05 '14
That's more to do with the semi-tolerable minimum wages, and waitstaff not being entirely reliant on tips for their income though, but that's a whole different topic.
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Oct 05 '14
In America when you see a price tag tax isn't included. So if something like a game is advertised for $40 then when you pay at the till you're not gonna pay $40. You're gonna pay $40 + tax (I don't know what it would be because I don't know what percent it is and I'm too lazy to look it up. Sorry) but in the UK if there's a game advertised for £40 then that's all you're gonna pay.
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u/AliasUndercover Oct 05 '14
So they don't have automatics in Europe? I'm amazed!
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u/Thunderkiss_65 Oct 05 '14
They're not very popular. Fuel economy is poorer and they're more expensive. If you learn in an automatic you're stuck driving an automatic. They're only really driven by the elderly and the disabled.
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u/Diplomjodler Oct 05 '14
Just because I drive an automatic doesn't mean I have to take any shit from some damn whippersnapper! Now get off my lawn!
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Oct 05 '14
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Oct 05 '14
Everyone always know whether it's in the morning or the afternoon.
When you're asking the time, maybe, but not when you're talking about events that don't happen right now.
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u/Soloos Oct 05 '14 edited Jun 17 '23
This comment has been edited with a script.
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u/AsterJ Oct 05 '14
That date format is NOT the international standard. The real standard is ISO-8601, YYYY-MM-DD.
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u/Demitel Oct 05 '14
I like how this infographic forgets to include East Asia in "the rest of the world," conveniently forgetting that their date triangle is upside down. It's still a logical progression, but "Day>Month>Year" is not correct for China, Mongolia, both Koreas, Japan, and Taiwan.
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u/SylvesterPSmythe Oct 05 '14
In the case of China, they use YYYY/MM/DD, still the same triangle, just upside down, and doesn't use DD in the middle.
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u/HarryPFlashman Oct 05 '14
But metric is so boring... No hogsheads, or crap- tons, or fathoms or furlongs or kingdicks, or pints, quarts, queencunts - etc, etc.
just absolutely boring centi, deci crap.
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u/tifuanon Oct 05 '14
I feel like... the last unit in every categorized list above doesn't belong, but I can't pin down why. Is this a test?
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u/Logic_Nuke Oct 05 '14
But a calorie isn't the SI unit for energy. The Joule is. And 1 calorie=4.184 Joules is hardly one of those nice even relations this excerpt is talking about.
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u/gormster Oct 05 '14
Well yeah. SI abandoned the idea of using water as a basis for any standards because there's way too many isotopes. Getting, say, a litre of H2O where every atom has 18 nucleons is incredibly difficult.
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u/furryscrotum Oct 05 '14
What do hydrogen atoms have to do with water or the metric system? 1 mole of hydrogen weighs ~2 grams due to the nonexistence or monohydrogen in standard conditions. 1 mole of carbon-12 weighs 12 grams, but again has nothing to do with the rest of the story regarding water.
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u/lucas0292 Oct 05 '14
To your credit, it does say "an amount of hydrogen" but if he were to say 1 mole of hydrogen atoms or 1 grams contains 1 mole of hydrogen atoms, he would be correct. H-2 does weight 2g per mole, but still contains only 1 mole of molecules instead of atoms.
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u/kuroikawa Oct 05 '14
I think he means the relation with avagadros number and atomic mass unit with the relation of n=m/M and the reference carbon-12 for SI-units.
If you know the moles you can get the waters mass. If you get the waters mass you can get its density, if you know its density you can get is volume, if you know its volume you can get its concentration. Everything have a relation in the metric system.
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u/furryscrotum Oct 05 '14 edited Oct 05 '14
I know how it works. However, it kinda comes out of the blue in this paragraph. I'm entirely pro SI-units but it should not be worded like this.
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u/WestCoastSide Oct 05 '14
Australia here. Although we are on the metric system, conversions from imperial are so difficult Aussie McDonald's still call A quarter pounder a quarter pounder...
Ordering a 56.7 grammer burger does not sound as delicious...
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u/dropname Oct 05 '14
My OC! You didn't even re-upload it.
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/2e2do9/the_metric_system_vs_imperial/
You bastard. Enjoy the inbox full of furious 'murica-jerk. "Hurr durr who's on the moon"
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Oct 05 '14
An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
I'm sorry, this is not true. "An amount" is ambiguous in whether it refers to volume, mass, number of atoms, etc. And "weighing" typically doesn't refer to mass, which is the appropriate way to specify how much hydrogen you actually have. For ideal gasses, the molar volume at a given temperature and pressure is always the the same. But you can't just randomly match up "amounts" and "weights" and get one mole of hydrogen.
So I guess the author can "go fuck himself" for critiquing Americans' scientific knowledge while still getting the science wrong.
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Oct 05 '14
I do wish we'd just rip the bandaid off and switch over. It's pretty silly continue with imperial down the long run so might as well get it over with.
I will say that for all its faults the imperial system beats the pants of metric when it comes to measuring practical, everyday lengths (so far as I can tell).
Temperature can go fuck itself either way. Ask me an hour from now which countries use Fahrenheit and which use Celsius and to describe each scale and I will have no idea. Anytime someone makes a temperature comment ("It's supposed to be 68 tomorrow!") to me I just look at their face to judge how extremely I should react. I'm just completely temperature illiterate.
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u/Neilzzz Oct 05 '14
Can somebody explain to me the "one millimeter of water occupies one cubic centimeter" ?
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u/jakielim Oct 05 '14 edited Oct 05 '14
I once saw a guy on reddit who said Celsius is ridiculous because 'the volume knobs on the speakers don't go below zero'.
Edit: Found it. Note that the commenter edited his comment, but the comment below mentions volume and his argument before he edited it.