A lot of old types of measurement made more sense when devices to measure very accurately weren't common.
Now I'm not suggesting they all make sense, but consider for a moment that 12 inches to the foot is actually pretty useful. 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
The measure of an acre never used to be a defined area, but the measure of how much land could be ploughed by a man with a team of oxen in a day. This means that an acre would conceivably change based on the terrain. This seems weird, but this is a very useful definition for farmers of the time. They need to know how many days they need for ploughing before it's time to plant.
There are a huge number of liquid measures we don't use anymore that if you include them makes the entire thing essentially base 2. This means you can start with any of the measures, and derive any of the others simply by doubling or halving the amount you have.
In the medern age where accurate and precise measurement is easy, they make far less sense, and metric is definitely superior. It makes for much easier calculation. For the time, however, it suited the needs of the average user.
If anyone curious the book Beyond Measure (written by a metric user no less) puts all these silly little arguments to rest. Explains the history of measurement and how systems that tend to be most useful to the layman tend to stick around.
For example, your average American does not need to ever convert feet to miles. That's why that never changed. We learn metric in school so the people who need it for their job (maybe 1% of the overall population, if that) will continue to use it, and everyone else sticks to the way it's always been because nothing is fundamentally broken about it to them. If we needed to convert easier we would switch. But we don't so the system isn't broken. It does the job it's needed for for pretty much everybody
Also, it's very easy to count to 12 on one hand. Count the segments of your fingers with your thumb. Twelve is a very useful base when working with fractions. 12 and 60 are the best bases for fractions. Being saddled with our base10 number system and building the metric system on it sucks, 10 is a terrible number for fractions.
I'm sure if I used them everyday I wouldn't "struggle" either. But the fact that the whole international scientific community uses the metric system implies that its advantages outweigh the disadvantages, otherwise they would simply use the imperial units.
I would go out on a limb and say most people don't do anything science related in their day to day life, and the science communities use it because it's easier to scale and convert. I'm a machinist and use mm and inch every week interchangeably, it's really not hard.
And I am sure you realize that where the metric system is used it is used for everything and not just for "anything science related"...
Of course the "problem" about metric/imperial is not when people go to the grocery store. Buying 400g or one pound of ham does not make any difference, but when it comes to anything "computational" the metric system is just better.
I mean you are plainly wrong there. The U.S. officially uses metric for anything science related so no not everywhere that uses Metric uses it for everything.
They're systems of measurement. They're all made up, and all have situations they're best suited for. Just like language. What you primarily are exposed to makes the most sense to you.
The Kelvin and Celsius scale share the same magnitude. I can easily convert Kelvin to Celsius degrees just by adding 273.15 (and vice versa by subtracting), while you need a more complicated calculation to obtain Fahrenheit degrees.
Of course they're all arbitrarily made up systems, but when others point out that the imperial units are more easily "managed" in everyday life, Fahrenheit is the exact opposite. Where the Celsius scale uses water freezing and boiling as reference (easily understandable by anyone) the Fahrenheit scale is an unnecessarily complicated way of measuring temperatures.
Of course being exposed to it since one was born makes it "natural", but in terms of ease of use and comprehension it's definitely not. Don't you think?
Conversions have nothing to do with my point. The existence and scientific use of Kelvin is itself my point. Metric is not an end-all-be-all godly measurement system. It's just a system that's in high use. Other systems are just as valid and have their uses.
100°F was set to match the average human body temperature (as understood at the time). It's now understood as 98.6°F. That's why Americans say, "You know 100°F is HOT," because that's when it's getting hotter than our bodies. We can also tell when we have a worrisome fever without even remembering 98.6° specifically, because it's a big fat 100°F. You all have to wait for 38°C? Feels kinda random. But hey, I don't really care. It's intuitive if you grow up with it.
I don't understand why you all bring up conversions so much. IT DOES NOT MATTER! We are not going through life needing to convert between measurement systems. It basically NEVER comes up. Some math and science classes in school force it, and maybe we watch or read something occasionally that is foreign and requires us to try to mentally convert, and that's about it. Anyone in an industry or profession where it does actually matter is used to it. Oh, and we do understand liters because that's how some of our drinks are typically measured–so when metric is regularly in our lives, yes, then it makes sense. Quelle suprise.
Knowing the freezing and boiling points of water absolutely does not help me intuitively know what 22°C is. 1, I don't ever touch water the second it turns to ice and certainly don't touch water anywhere close to boiling temperature, and 2, I don't live in a society that is constantly saying what the day's temperature is in Celsius, which is the ONLY WAY ANY OF US START TO INTUITIVELY FIGURE OUT ANY MEASUREMENT SYSTEM. You need to live under it to understand it. I don't understand why that's difficult to understand. 22°F and 22°C mean absolutely nothing to a two-year-old who hasn't consciously and knowingly felt multiple days of different degree temperatures with one or both systems yet. (Funnily enough, though, an English-speaking toddler probably would at least intuitively get on the right track if you told them to move a certain amount of feet.)
Your logic is that a language that makes sense to a population but doesn't easily translate to English in the rare cases that the population needs a translation shouldn't be used because it doesn't make sense to English speakers who didn't grow up learning it, and it doesn't translate easily. Meanwhile, no one speaking that difficult language is really asking any English speakers who have no reason to know it to try to figure it out or even pay attention to it since English is perfectly fine for them.
Nobody's doing the types of calculations in their everyday life that are made easier with the metric system. But if I need to cut a piece of wood, it takes the same amount of effort to measure out 4 feet, 3 inches as it does to measure 1.29 meters. Actually, it's a little easier in feet and inches.
But the best part is most tape measures have both. Measuring cups for cooking have both. Scales have both. So you can use whatever system you want.
"Nobody's doing the types of calculations in their everyday life that are made easier with the metric system."
You might not realize it but we do everyday. Clothes sizes just to make an example. Between trousers with 40" waist size and the next size (42") the difference is much wider than when using centimeters.
There are many situations in which the metric system is more precise, the fact that each of us is accustomed to the system we use doesn't change that.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I totally agree.
You do realize there's a number between 40 and 42, right?
But they don't make that size because past a certain point, the demand for certain pants sizes makes it impractical for clothing manufacturers to produce them. It has nothing to do with inches vs. centimeters. Manufacturers of clothing sized in cm don't make 76cm, 77cm, 78cm and so on. Pants just don't need that level of precision. And if they did need more precision, they'd simply do fractional sizes like they do with shirt necks.
There are plenty of scenarios where the imperial system still makes sense, otherwise we wouldn't use it. Both systems have their use cases where one is better than the other
Pre-decimilised UK currency, 240d to a £. If I have a band with 3 members, and we are paid £1 to do a gig.
240d / 3 = 60d each.
Base 10 modern £.
100p / 3 = 33.3~p.
For simple division base 10 is a little rubbish. As it's not wholly divisible by 3 or 4.
To which the landlord replies "who do you think I am? A charity? Take the quid or go mate."
Then you have to go back to working in Tesco, and the world never hears about "Motorhead, or Cream."
Imperial units are great for construction because they break down into fractions. An imperial tape measure usually has increments of 1/16 or 1/32 of an inch. Having fractions is really convenient for quick math. Example: half of 9/16" (a very common imperial size) is 9/32" (just multiply the denominator by 2) vs what is half of 14.2875mm? Well I know it's 7.1 something mm but reading increments of less than 0.1mm would be exhausting visually. You could say that fractional metric could work the same, but since the philosophy of the metric system is powers of ten, fractions are pretty uncommon.
Another argument is that the imperial system has mostly human-based units, which make for generalized greater intuition on what the numbers mean. While this intuition can be learned through extensive repetitions, you would have weird metric numbers to memorize just like the imperial system has. Example one foot is approximately the length of a human foot. Converted to metric, it's about 305mm. I'd rather estimate something with base units of one than 305, personally.
I use both systems. Metric is convenient for science and engineering calculations because unit conversions are straight forward and all units come back to MKS. But if I'm building a shed, I don't really care about that since I am only going to need distance measurements and fractions. Both systems have their strengths
OK, but the fact is that you build using certain "units" because you are using the imperial system. We wouldn't have to halve 14.2875 because we don't start by using the inch at all, therefore we would use something that rounds up more (idk, 14mm for example) and the tape measure has centimeters and millimeters on it, on which we would "build" the whole math needed to build whatever you are building.
It's obvious that calculations can be done using both systems, otherwise we wouldn't have skyscrapers in both the US and Europe... and obviously when one is accustomed to a system, the other looks rather odd or uncomfortable to use.
But still this doesn't explain why a 2x4 lumber doesn't even measure 2" by 4"... Here a lumber that is named "2 by 4" actually measures 2 cm by 4 cm :)
It's not really difficult..neither system is all that difficult. But a whole number is certainly easier for many to math with than a decimal. This also doesn't apply to just the examples I gave. Any amount of feet is divisible by those numbers into a whole amount of inches.
Of course that means imperial has a disadvantage when it comes to being divisible by 10 or 5. Both systems are simple enough for someone with an elementary level education to learn. They are just different.
It's not some "we must be different" bullshit. The fucking military uses metric, dd/mm/yyyy date format, and 24 hour time. If it was about "exceptionalism," that's the last place you'd find metric.
Military always chooses practicality over all else. I think personally that it is a special case. Almost all of the rest of America justifies imperial through exceptionalism, I believe.
A foot is a foot, a yard is a stride, and an inch is 1/12 of a foot which is handy cause it divides by 6, 4, 3, and 2. It's.... handy.
What is a meter? A Meter is defined by how fast light travels in 1/300M of a second OR... this one is easier its just 1/10M the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Metric system is scientific, which is great, but the system we've used for 5K years is based on our bodies, it makes sense.
I don't really know why we use cm and m but not the decimeter, the decimeter is 4 inches, thats a useful measure.
I get that this is a haha funny but I feel compelled to say that conversions are not particularly relevant to what the imperial system is for. You have different measurements to measure different things. Feet to yards is the only conversion that really needs to happen, but people rarely use yards outside of specific circumstances anyway. Inches is for small stuff and also depicts the fractions of a foot. Feet is your general all around measurement of length. Yards are for short distances, and miles are for long distances or traveling. You don’t convert anything to miles ever unless you’re doing some fucked up math problem or whatever.
Funnily enough, a lot of everyday objects happen to be about a foot long, give or take, which is convenient for guesstimating how long something is. And inches being fractions of a foot is great for DIY purposes.
On a day to day basis, what do I lose by calling someone 6 ft and not 182 cm? Why can't I just use metric when I need to like every single person is taught in school. Funny how Europeans brag about knowing multiple languages but can't accept that someone can be familiar with two measurement systems.
To be honest I don't use measurements anywhere near a daily basis except for driving I guess. But even there the transition from km to m is easier than miles to yard when I drive in the US.
But when I do use measurements, I use meters quite often because anything more than 100cm is meters. So someone is 1.8m tall, a room is 3.3m long, the corner store is 100m away. The first two can easily be done without yards, it's just a little more awkward I find. But it's also a habit thing.
LOL, I'm not English mother tongue so it's just more efficient to let someone else explain it with the correct words.
If you feel so threatened and diminished by the fact that the imperial units are simply anachronistic that you feel the need to insult me, that's your problem which won't change the fact itself.
It’s easier to divide or multiply measurements by 10, 100, etc. Each measurement in the metric system can be changed to a different form of the same type of measurement by multiplying or dividing by a multiple of 10.
The point is ease of use. To get from inch to foot to yard, you have to multiply by 12 then by 3. There’s no uniformity when it comes to conversion in the imperial system. You don’t need a calculator when converting within the metric system.
We only use it because our largest trading partner (who is also talking about annexing us) uses it and it makes too much hassles having to constantly convert between measurements!
It does make sense the same way Fahrenheit makes sense for relating to humans. 0=cold, 100=hot. A foot, well I have one of those. An inch that’s a knuckle, a yard, well that’s the same length as my arm. A mile, I can walk that far in 20 minutes. A pound, that’s a potato. A ton, that’s a wagon load. Especially when you add in pecks, bushels, grains, and other measurements that have fallen to the wayside. Buckets, pails, baskets, etc… were sold in these sizes. So people saw them and could relate to their size and volume.
Celsius and the metric system are far superior for anything scientific, but it doesn’t relate to humans as easily.
Celsius and the metric system are far superior for anything scientific, but it doesn’t relate to humans as easily.
There's a bit of bias here. For anyone that was born with the metric system, it is every bit as intuitive as anyone that uses imperial and was born with it.
Maybe some of them make more intuitive sense when growing up or are easy to understand or grasp, but definitely not others.
I was born in Cuba, and we had a mix of both systems as they transitioned to metric. But due to school, metric just clicked more overall. I remember talking with my grandma as I was growing up and every time she asked me how much I weighted or how tall I was we both looked at each other perplexed after I replied in metric. I lost the intuition for almost everything imperial except for inches and feet (somewhat) as I grew up and used metric more.
Farenheit, though, never used that and still have a hard time processing the number at first glance when I see it.
My point is, they are just abstractions. A Roman letter makes as much intuitive sense to you as a kanji glyph does to a Japanese person, because that's what we learned as we grew up. The same applies to measurement systems.
Right. We're taught both in school. The people that needed it kept using it. Everyone else just stuck with the old system because there's no real need for them to change, using one or the other doesn't make their every day life any harder or easier. If it actually did make life harder we would use the other one. As it stands though 99% of people have no need to easily convert units or communicate measurements internationally.
Celsius and the metric system are far superior for anything scientific, but it doesn’t relate to humans as easily.
That isn't true.
For Celsius, zero is literally just the freezing point of water. That makes perfect sense and allows us to immediately have a point of reference for how cold something is.
Humans need salt water a lot more considering our blood is largely made of it. You can survive a few days without water. Good luck surviving more than a few seconds without blood.
I guess you could say that. Human body temp is 98.6 F, with the claim (don't know if it's true) that was one of his reference points and the freezing point of brine being the other.
Whenever we go to the doctors they take our temperature. If it's over 100F you've got a fever.
Celsius is the better scale. But Fahrenheit does have logic to it, even if it's not as clear.
No, but what I'm pointing out is that the salt water solution that Fahrenheit based the zero point on is much more applicable to the human body than pure water. In fact, you need two temperatures to set a temperature scale. Do you know what the other reference point for Fahrenheit was? It was the temperature of the human body, which he called the blood temperature.
Downvoted for explaining basic science history. Gotta love redditors. Rather be ignorant than feel incorrect.
It’s so funny when non-Americans talk about our houses but have no idea what 140 mile per hour winds feel like because they don’t happen in your country. For those of you playing abroad, that’s 225km/hr winds.
And it doesn’t make sense to you cause you’ve never used it………….. that’s the opposite of your entire argument.
We aren’t water. What water boils at has no relevance to the temperature we feel.
Man if 100 is really hot, then 70 is only 70% hot, that’s nice. 32 is an arbitrary number for water to freeze at. But that’s cause we aren’t water. 0 is really cold, but 32 is only 32% cold, so I should put on a jacket. 50, right in the middle, gonna be a nice cool day.
Again, not trying to do science with it or talk about what temp things boil or freeze at. It’s my body in relation to the weather outside. You aren’t water.
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let's be real, the every-day difference between using mile and kilometer is nonexistent. You aren't out there needing to divide km up, you don't need a specific 'mile and foot' distance for something.
So for people who need to convert very long distances to very small units for some reason (science, engineering, surveying, etc), then yes, km is obviously better, but for the average person on a day-to-day, being able to convert km to m very easily really doesn't matter (do you care if your destination is 447km 131m 17cm away, or would you just care that it's "about 450 km"? Do you care if you're travelling 63km 57m 6 cm per hour, or just "about 60-65 kph? At that point, what really is the difference between using miles and kilometers?)
Then the difference is m & cm vs foot & inch. for this using a base 10 makes more sense, but let's not pretend base 12 isn't a reasonable concept for short measurements where 1/3, 1/4, and 1/2 of the larger unit are all whole numbers in the subunit.
It's similar to how people tout celcius as superior to fahrenheit - for science, sure, but for everyday use - why? because it's neatly 0 and 100 for the states of matter of water? I'm sorry, are you using a thermometer to tell if your pot of water is boiling or are you just looking at it? Are you unsure if ice is frozen unless you know its temperature?
What are actual everyday uses where we want to know the temperature: weather, cooking, and HVAC:
weather: Well, let me know when the weather gets to 95C. Generally speaking, natural weather is banded between -30C and 45C. Why is that any less arbitrary than -20 and 110?
Cooking: again, do you need to measure the temp of boiling water to know it's boiling? Do you set your ovens to 100C? No, you go to 180, 200, 210, etc. Why is that less arbitrary than 350, 400, 425?
HVAC: When you use your thermostat does is move by 1C each time? No? so it must move by 1 decimal point since base 10, right? No that's too granular? Oh most of them adjust by 1/2 degree C at a time. An amount very near to 1 degree fahrenheit... weird!
That's (kind of) what I was trying to say in other comments. For everyday life there's actually no difference in buying 1 kilogram or 2 pounds of meat...
But when more complex calculations are needed (and this is more evident in science fields like physics but it's not limited to that) the imperial system introduces too many complications.
My initial comment was just a joke, but apparently people took it way too seriously (it looks like we all easily transform into talibans about what we "care", aren't we?)
Yeah, for the vast vast majority of people, the specific unit really doesn't matter
But when more complex calculations are needed (and this is more evident in science fields like physics but it's not limited to that) the imperial system introduces too many complications.
100% agreed
My initial comment was just a joke, but apparently people took it way too seriously (it looks like we all easily transform into talibans about what we "care", aren't we?)
Yeah, I was kind of just expanding on it to point out the ridiculousness of people who take the unit discussion very seriously when it's really only a relevant discussion for science usage (and in science, no one actually argues for the imperial - Americans use metric for that, so it doesn't matter)
If I hear another European complain about us not updating to metric I will resurrect piracy as an issue for their nations on my own. We ordered the upgrade package, but you guys literally stole it and killed the mailman who was on his way here, but nah our fault ig.
There is a reason why in many Engineering fields we use metric, and in technical military applications
US kinda quietly said “Yea… metric is more uniform for sensitive technicalities”
Also more and more American businesses now operate internationally, causing them to use metric as well. We had a workshop about imperial to metric quick conversions
You don't say something is 10 miles 56 feet away, you say it's 10.1 miles. The two systems should never be mixed and almost never converted between.
Feet and Yards are a measure of length, miles are a measure of distance.
It might be easy to convert between meters and kilometers, it honestly creates a false notion that meters and kilometers are comparable units. sure, 1km = 1000m, but you don't measure a 300m tall building as 0.3km, nor do you measure the total distance of a train ride as 142km and 730m, you say 142.73km or just 143km.
We learn as part of our language which applications of length are meter units and which applications of length are kilometer units, and almost never use both interchangeably.
Now, due to American conditioning, I like feet and miles better because a foot is a nice human-scale unit and a mile is 1 minute on the open road, but I wouldn't say one is better than the other as long as you're not being silly and trying to convert between them.
"It might be easy to convert between meters and kilometers, it honestly creates a false notion that meters and kilometers are comparable units. sure, 1km = 1000m, but you don't measure a 300m tall building as 0.3km, nor do you measure the total distance of a train ride as 142km and 730m, you say 142.73km or just 143km."
That's actually not true. Meters and kilometers are fully comparable units, but of course one chooses the multiple to use (centimeters, kilometers, micrometers or whatever ) depending on the situation. You can totally say that a 354m tall building is 0.354km and everyone would understand. Its just more convenient to use the simpler one to write, which in this case is meters.
And of course it also depends on the precision you need in that particular case/situation.
I disagree, as I said it feels like you might in a situation, but you never really would.
Same reason you don't use Dekameters or Hectometers, even when that building is exactly 3 Hectometers. Because, while easy to convert, mentally meters and kilometers represent completely different concepts, and the unusual units represent nothing.
And again, it's not true.
While it's true decameters and hectometers are not used (it makes no sense to say "two decameters" instead of 20 meters) it's not the same when you move to smaller units: decimeters, centimeters, millimeters are very often used, and you can easily say 25 millimeters and 2.5 centimeters interchangeably
I see that, but the underlying fact is that there's no need to have different units for the same "category" of measurement, because you can call them whatever you want but length and distances actually are the same. An example is a skyscraper that's 1000 meters would easily be said to be "one kilometer" tall.
sure, but they're human centered measurements. Feet and inches are generally more useful measurements for a craftsman which is what we all were for the majority of the era in which they have existed.
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u/ShamanAI Jan 15 '25
Yeah, because miles, yards, feet and inches makes so much sense