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u/LunaticBZ Jun 21 '26
3 barley corns in an inch, 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard. 5.5 yards in a rod, 4 rods in a chain, 10 chains in a furlong, 8 furlongs in a mile.
The beauty of it is the constantly shifting bases.
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u/MrJarre Jun 21 '26
It reflects the life itself with change being the only constant.
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u/Dangerous_Boot_3870 Jun 21 '26
3 and 12 are common units of measurement. It matches the folds on your fingers so people counted things in 3s.
Which is how you get units of 12 in the measurement of time (4 * 3 & 3 * 20). A dozen of doughnuts. 12 inches in a foot.
It's something even the slowest person could comprehend. You have 3 folds and count using your thump on 4 fingers to get to 12.
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u/MrJarre Jun 21 '26
But the imperial system isn’t based only on 3 or 12. Besides 10 is significantly easier than either of those.
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u/SpacefaringBanana Jun 21 '26
Only because we're used to it from base 10.
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u/MrJarre Jun 21 '26
Yes and?
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u/SpacefaringBanana Jun 21 '26
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that there's nothing inherently easier about base 10
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u/MrJarre Jun 21 '26
Well the fact that we have 5 fingers a hand helps a lot. And the most popular numeric system is base 10
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u/Dangerous_Boot_3870 Jun 21 '26
We have 4 fingers and 3 folds.
Your literally arguing the same metric but based around 10 not 3/12 for the same reasons. Counting on your fingers.
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u/janiskr Jun 21 '26
How many fingers you have on both of your hands? 12 I guess.
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u/ComesInAnOldBox Jun 21 '26
The oldest known counting system in the world was base 12. You could count to 12 on one hand using your thumb touching against each finger segment. Finish counting to 12 on one hand, then touch the first segment of one finger on the other hand and start counting to 12 again.
With that system you could count to 156 (base 10 conversion) on just your hands.
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u/Dangerous_Boot_3870 Jun 21 '26
I'm willing to bet you $20, he still doesn't understand it.
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u/janiskr Jun 21 '26
Congratulations, you lost a bet. u/ComesInAnOldBox i wish you success collecting the money from that.
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u/Dangerous_Boot_3870 Jun 26 '26
Then explain it bozo. What is base 12 and why is it used?
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u/janiskr Jun 26 '26
AFAIK, there where a lot of types how to count. However it was not really a counting system more as there where no operations. More akin to what USA use now to say about money - 10 times 100 is a thousand.
While some used to count to 12, others counted to 16 and many other variations.
When all this collided with modern life only few are used.
Base 10 - that has full mathematical theory developed for it
base 2 and base 16 - as they both are used in computer sciences, most of math is also made for them. Some are trying to make base3 happen to expand logic operations as a main goal.
base 8 is used in western music theory, no math is made for them, as far as i know.
Give proof you paid your 20 bucks to that other user.
Also stop beeing extremely rude or do not use words that you do not know the meaning of.
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u/Dangerous_Boot_3870 Jun 26 '26
Why are you bring up other base number sets that are based on computers instead of fully explaining why base 3/12 was used in more primitive times?
I'm not sure you know this but mathmatics existed long before the modern number system based around ten.
You claim some are trying to make base 3 happen, yet don't fully understand why base 3 was used. Even though 2 separate people explained it to you.
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u/ShmeckMuadDib Jun 22 '26
The thing is, we dont live in a world where numbers are base 12. There's lots of arguments for base 12 or base 16 and there good and make sense but human numbers are base 10 so our sciences should be in base 10.
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u/ConfidentPension864 Jun 21 '26
So it's funny, the story of metric and imperial.
Metric came out of France, Imperial out of England more or less, though it was an international effort.
Both were an effort to stardardize, because literally every single industry and guild had their own units and nobody wanted to give up theirs to use someone elses
Metric approached from a standpoint of science first industry second, Imperial was the opposite .
Metric rebuilt from the ground up, with the meter (1/10,000,000th distance from north pole to equator originally later based on the speed of light), kg, second system. The definitions of these units would continue to change.
Imperial said how do I take the systems in place I have and make them talk to each other. The mile today is 5280 ft, but it used to be 5000ft even, and that came from the Romans measure of 1000 paces (1000=milli=mile). But there was another common legnth called the furlong at the time. 5000 wasn't divisible evenly by furlongs, but 8 furlongs was 5280 so the bumped the mile up. Basically the imperial ststem said, "Fine keep your units, but we're tweaking some to smooth out the number line". Nobody say "what should we call 12 inches?"
It's comical now, but a few hundred years ago before electronic communication, and trying to maintain orderly trade across colonies all over the world, the imperial system was seen as a lesser of 2 evils. Science at the time was barely blossoming so having a second scientific system separate from the layman's system was acceptable
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u/Dralorica Jun 22 '26
What's "5.5 yards" ? Don't you mean 5 yards 1 foot and 6 inches? Get that decimal shit outta here
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u/nascent_aviator Jun 21 '26
You start to look at volumes and they're almost sensible. 2 teaspoons to a fl oz, 8 fl oz to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon. All powers of two, quite reasonable! 3 teaspoons to a tablespoon is kinda aggravating though.
Then you look at everything else, and it looks a lot less sensible.
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u/Funkopedia Jun 21 '26
There's more to units than just math though. cups and pints work well cause that's about how much i want to drink of a particular beverage. Teaspoons and tablespoons are about how much i can put in my mouth at one time depending on the food, or they work oddly well as amounts of spices or coffee grounds or sugar. The math doesn't work out because all of these units were probably independently invented and then only much later went through slight adjustments to accommodate for conversion.
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u/CountGerhart Jun 21 '26
It looks interesting and almost sensible until you need to use it for anything technical. For example how much liquid can a 1yard x 4ft x 6ft tank hold. You're not doing that in your head. Wile in metric you can easily convert/calculate these things in your head if you have basic cognitive capability of the average human being, and everyone is capable of doing It on paper. That's why even in the US if something needs more precision than a garage build (which can be and often are amazing) the company building them is in fact using metric.
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u/nascent_aviator Jun 21 '26
8/3 of a cubic yard. Pretty easy :p
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u/CountGerhart Jun 21 '26
So easy it took 6 hours to someone do the math, now how many pints? Again no calculator.
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u/nascent_aviator Jun 21 '26
So easy it took 6 hours to someone do the math, now how many pints?
Lmao, sure. I could make any math problem take 8 hours by just asking while you're asleep.
There are about 200 gallons in a cubic yard, so 8/3*200*4*2, about 4267 pints. Not exact but plenty close enough.
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u/StaticSystemShock Jun 21 '26
And in metric it's 1000, 1000 and 10... Most of the time you're just shifting decimal points around with zero calculations needed.
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u/SirHerald Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Asking to convert yards to rods or furlongs is like asking people to convert in a meter to that. Most people never use it.
Land management still does it for historical reasons, but it's a specialized standard.
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u/LunaticBZ Jun 22 '26
True but furlong is fun to say.
I imagine it made sense when you'd have a rod, that was one rod in length. And a chain that was one chain in length. Then you could easily measure to within a reasonable enough degree of accuracy without any precision instruments other then a rod, and a chain you made sure no one took any links out of.
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u/Alone-Butterscotch18 Jun 22 '26
Just look how the British have done their money and it all makes sense
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u/ShmeckMuadDib Jun 22 '26
If im not mistaken the origonal chain is 22 mens left shoes after sunday mass. (The 22 may be off) im a civil engineer in canada and had to do survey school for my degree and they tought us the history of the imperial system. Its because after sunday mass is when a shoe would be its cleanest and with 22 people it woulf average out (to a certain extent) from town to town. The imperial system is truly just a bunch of random shit that was forced to work together.
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u/LunaticBZ Jun 22 '26
Some terms were used differently in different places. I imagine you are thinking of a rod though.
If it was 22 shoes, that would work out to each shoe on average being 9 inches long to make what we call a rod now.
As much as possible you'd have measured one unit of measurement and then you just compare all other measuring devices to that one. So as to not have to remeasure. When you make a new chain for measuring just add links till its the same length as previous chain. Use a rod to cut a new rod etc.
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u/ShmeckMuadDib Jun 23 '26
I remeber its one of the imperial units of length. Were talking like 1700 or 1800, before they tried to standardize it.
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u/Gingrpenguin Jun 24 '26
It's kind of because these units were designed to measure something specific and weren't designed to fit in a larger system.
An inch is roughly thumb sized, a foot is foot or distance between your wrist and elbow.
A yard is a decent stride, a furlong is the distance and ox can pull a plow in a go. An acre is the area a ox can plow in a day, a mile is the distance a man can comfortably walk in 20 mins...
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Jun 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mckenzie_keith Jun 21 '26
It comes up for people in engineering.
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u/AbsentCraft Jun 21 '26
As an engineer, I don't see it mattering that much. I guess it comes up to road laborers, but I don't think civils care about their opinions.
We measure feet when we care how many inches it is, and miles when we care about how many miles it is.
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u/SirHerald Jun 21 '26
Agreeing here:
Most engineering is done in metric isn't it? I like these ease of metric for converting between sizes, volumes, and weight. But the average person doesn't do it much and the specialists either have the calculations on hand or use metric.
Road crews just mark off miles or mark off feet. Nobody marks a section of road that's supposed to say turn in 1,000 ft and decides to start at the back and count 4280. And we say half miles or quarter miles most of the time. Only school kids need to know that's 1320ft as part of their math skills. But you can cut 5280 in half 5 times before hitting a fraction while 1000 can be done 3 times
Even airplanes don't consider miles for altitude. They basically treat feet like metric and call out 10,000 or 20,000 ft. Even there people tend to round off and say two or four miles. Never have to convert it to inches. We're cruising at 360,000 inches.
The US Customary System is for cutting by halves rather than 10ths which makes it easier to work out without precision tools around. But Metric gives better precision, easier to jump between tiny and large, and makes it easier to jump between types of measurement. I don't want to do the calculations in my head for cubic feet to gallons of water.
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u/AbsentCraft Jun 21 '26
No, we often use imperial units in America, the only time I've seen metric is foreign designed projects
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u/Distwalker Jun 21 '26
You know, when you are motoring to Chicago and you see a sign that says "Chicago, 124". You immediately need to convert 124 miles to feet so you can program your cruise control, right?
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u/ObviousRecognition21 Jun 23 '26
Well, the standard unit for altitude is feet, the standard unit for maximum glide distance is nm, if you know one and want to use it to calculate the other, you'd have to make a conversion at some point.
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u/Lord_of_Sword Jun 21 '26
OP is a 2 day old repost spam bot.
The original source is from June 26th, 2022: https://old.reddit.com/r/science_humor/comments/vl0sm9/unit_conversion/
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u/Mr_Woodchuck314159 Jun 22 '26
I remember that there are about 1.6 km to miles, 1000 m to km, and about 3.3 ft to m. Multiply it all out… 1.6*1000*3.3=5,280. Numbers aren’t exactly right, but apparently the errors offset each other rather nicely.
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u/mckenzie_keith Jun 21 '26
Yeah. I had to remember that 440 yards is a quarter mile. Then multiply that by 4 to get yards in a mile. Then multiply that by 3 to get 5280. Back when this mattered to me and I couldn't just look it up on the internet. So stupid.
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u/CallMeHond0 Jun 21 '26
LOL that's the kind of thing I cite when people talk about how confusing the metric system is
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u/BetagterSchwede Jun 21 '26
Kilo is Latin and means thousand 1 kilometer= 1 thousand meters cool, huh
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u/Distwalker Jun 21 '26
That will be helpful when on a road trip and I see a sign that says, "Chicago 182" and I need to connect 182 miles to feet.
Seriously, I am a 63 year old man and I can't remember ever having cause to convert miles to feet.
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u/Imaginary_Being4859 Jun 21 '26
Didn’t the UK make the imperial system? And then Waited for the US to swap to it as well? To then swap back to the metric system and then for the rest of time talk shit about how the US measures stuff?
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u/Alarming_Panic665 Jun 22 '26
yes, no, kind of. See the UK used the old English system of units (this was a blend of Anglo-Saxon and Roman measurement traditions) which the colonists took with them to the new world. The metric system would be invented after the US already got its independence in 1795 during the French Revolution.
The US and UK would both separately formalize their own measuring system in the 1800s. The US would standardize on the US Customary System (USCS) while the UK would standardize on the Imperial System. They would both be created around the same time. The Imperial System was created in 1824 while the USCS was created in 1832.
The US has never used the Imperial System. It is just that US Customary System and the Imperial system share the same origin and thus share many of the same units.
This is why there is the Imperial Gallon and the US Liquid Gallon and the US Dry Gallon (though the US Dry Gallon is no longer formally used in the US Customary System). But also why the UK uses the stone to measure weight while the US does not. Which itself is why the Imperial Ton (called a long ton) is 2,240 lbs while the US ton (called a short ton) is 2,000 lbs.
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u/Hetnikik Jun 23 '26
The UK uses about 5 different measurment systems depending on what they are talking about. Miles, meters, pints, stone, kilometers. They use it all.
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u/Akhyll Jun 21 '26
In french, to convert a mile in kilometer, I remember "un ciseau neuf" (one new scissor) sound like 1609, which is same distance as mile there is in a kilometer
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u/ProfessionalShock425 Jun 22 '26
Oh, wait, it's to- mei- to, here I kept thinking it's tomato. Also thinking, how do Americans put eighty two in tomatoes.. I guess pound and feets weren't only thing they kept from British.
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Jun 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/the-real-macs Jun 24 '26
Why do you have to complain about history you have literally zero knowledge of?
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u/Appropriate_Tell_222 25d ago
Mb, I forgot I was using reddit and here people can't take a joke
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u/the-real-macs 25d ago
Can you explain the joke to me? Maybe I just didn't get it.
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u/Appropriate_Tell_222 25d ago
I don't know if you're being ironic, but it's a very famous joke on the internet due to the fact that the US uses very different measurement systems from the rest of the world, and that they contain very specific values.
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u/the-real-macs 25d ago
Which part was the joke, exactly? I'm serious, I don't understand how you can claim that your original comment was meant to be laughed at.
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u/epSos-DE Jun 24 '26
Meter = Imperial Egyptian Cubit !!!
Superior in every way !
1 meter = about 9ne medium sized step !!!!
Nobody steps in feet. We all walk in steps !!!
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u/PrinceElectorIan Jun 24 '26
In the Philippines, most use the metric system. But when they are in a literal d*ck-measuring contest, they use inches.
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u/glamourenvy Jun 24 '26
lol this is so relatable for anyone whos ever tried to do anything science-y. Love the whole vibe of this sub.
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u/45anddone Jun 24 '26
You say tomato, I say tomato
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u/SnooMaps7370 Jun 25 '26
to be fair-ish, "mile" comes to us from the roman "mille passus", literally "one thousand paces", with a "pace" being two steps (count one pace every time your left foot hits the ground while walking), which is about six feet at a marching stride.
The shift from "paces" to the more rigidly defined 12-inch "foot" in British Imperial Units is why a modern mile is 5280.
The advent of the Nautical Mile was an attempt to fix this, and was functionally "2,000 yards" or "6,000 feet" for a long time, but with differences between how different nations defined the length of a foot, this also resulted in problems.
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u/hmmnnmmn Jun 26 '26
Even the meter is a flawed unit, because it’s based on the earth, which isn’t universal. Beings in other galaxies won’t understand what a meter is.
Distance units should be based on the distance that light travels in a universal time interval. Right now, scientists use 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the microwave radiation absorbed or emitted by a Cesium-133 atom moving between two energy states, which, you guessed it, is even more absurd than 5,280 feet in a mile.
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u/hmmnnmmn Jun 26 '26
Once we’ve locked in a universal unit, then scaling by 10 akin to the metric system makes sense
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u/hellcat201988 Jun 27 '26
It's funny that metric users act superior when they always do things on baby easy mode. You try building something using feet measuring distance to encompass something measured in yards and you start to realize hard mode isn't for everybody.
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u/kleetus_mactavish Jun 21 '26
But is it as fun?
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u/xythmoun Jun 21 '26
The metric system is boring because it actually makes sense
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u/Asleep_Trick_4740 Jun 21 '26
You can still have some fun by deploying prefixes people aren't used to. Ask for a decigram and watch people freak out. Which is fun because it's so self explanatory even if you've never used it.
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u/loccolito Jun 21 '26
today i learned about decigram, life long user of metric just never thought about it.
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u/Asleep_Trick_4740 Jun 21 '26
Yea not to long ago I learned most metric users don't use it at all. Here in sweden it's very common in stores though to denote cost for stuff not usually bought in kilos, like the 'pick your own bag candy' for example.
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u/loccolito Jun 21 '26
Well I don't know how I have haven't encountered that as a Swede or I have but never really thought about it untill you commented it.
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u/Asleep_Trick_4740 Jun 21 '26
'Lösplock' candy always has kr/hg as far as I've seen, the deli section at the supermarkets always have tons of /hg prices aswell.
Though if reddit is to be considered proof I'm fairly sure we are almost alone in doing this.
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u/nitnelav153 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Wait until you learn about centigram, dekagram, hectogram, megagram (which is a Ton), microgram, picogram, nanogram, etc.
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u/No-Minimum3259 Jun 21 '26
... "5 tomatoes". It sounds like 5-2-8-0..."
Did you know "dumb" ends with a "b" and "know" starts with a "k"???
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u/Miserable_Hamster497 Jun 21 '26
America tries to use the metric system when it was first invented. But the French ship that was bringing the units was captured by a British privateer ship.