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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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I'll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/iJymKowx8cY
TLDW: metric is better because all the different kinds of units were designed to work together.
Where as imperial units developed organically, within specific trades/use cases. They're not all supposed to work together.
I use imperial because that's what I was raised with, but I recognize metric is better in many ways. My only gripe with metric is the gap in units between Centimeters and Meters. A foot is convenient size for most things.
Well buddy, you're in luck because today you get to stop griping about something that's been part of SI units for the entirety of SI units.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimetre
Interesting. Looks like a decimeter comes out to just under 4", so still a fair bit less than a foot. I guess that's where a half-meter would come in. Honestly I think I just like imperial linguisticly, the terms and slang for all the units tickles me. Metric has a more sterile vibe. Which is fine, I reckon that was the whole idea of it!
Fun fact British imperial units are slightly different than American, because of course they are! This is an issue for folks that own, and work on, vintage British cars. American wrenches don't fit!
“If you’re under eighteen decimeters, swipe left.”
Standards perhaps a little too high
Aka '30 cm', it's not hard to say. As someone from a metric country you just say the absolute cm value, or maybe 'half a metre', etc.
Also every single kid who grew up in a metric country intuitively knows how long 30cm is. That's the length of a standard school ruler.. in the pencil case of every child.
Which is exactly how everyone, everywhere, uses measurement systems.
As I said elsewhere nobody's running around "quick, what's 1/5th of a mile?!?" We tend to go down to the quarter mile then just jump to yards. Then down to feet. It's absolutely equivalent to going from kilometers to meters to centimeters in terms of usage.
Like, has anyone ever really said "we're 153,267 centimeters from home?"
You think it is all convenient and easy to use intuitively, until i ask you, to convert how much water you use a day to how much water you use in a year and how much water your city uses.
Because your city measures in acre foot, which is 43,560 cubic feet or 325,850 US gallons. Actually there is a weird 3/7 of a gallon left
So you have no way of relating the ~20-40 gallons of water you use per day to the water use in your city ir the water you use in a year that is measured in centi-cubic-feet without pulling out a table and calculator.
Meanwhile i know that i use about 120 liters of water, which is 0.120 m3 a day. So my water bill in m3 is just a thousand liters per m3 and my city uses 230 million m3 a year or about 630.000 m3 a day. With that i can easily estimate that i use about 1/5.000.000 of my citys water.
So when we are talking about drought issues, or water demand etc. i can understand the values in the scientific and political debate, because i can actually relate them to my personal life.
The metric system empowers people because it makes SI units in any domain and of any size relateable and accessible. Meanwhile a kid in the US doesn't know what a mile is until it learns that by being driven enough miles to get a feel for how many yards that is.
Yeah, no. Knowing a different measuring system isn't gonna make me suddenly want to know the nitty-gritty details of things. The way water volume/use is measured in the US has nothing to do with how much people understand their water bill. If I really wanted to I'd just find something online to help me convert. Which I'd probably do on the other system because that's just reality. You know those things because you care about them or were interested not because you use what you consider to be a superior system of measurement lol. You guys really try hard to make it seem like a way bigger deal than it is.
of course you are free to be interested or not. But given the necessities of the transofrmation in energy, water, land use, transportation etc. i find it crucial to be able to relate to the political discussion to make an informed choice. I know most people aren't interested. But given that we are in a technological society we cannot afford not to relate to these things.
Well no, same as no one says '476.46 inches from the bin'. Cm work fine up to 100, then you talk m, then km. 'About two foot' and 'about sixty cm' are just as easy to say, you're just not used to the terminology
I fully understand roughly what 1/5 of a mile would be without any effort. That sounds perfectly reasonable and recognizable for me and I doubt I'm alone. It's because it's the system I use. Yours works for you because you're familiar with it. That's all there is to it.
Jefferson actually intended to make metric standard in the US back in 1793. Unfortunately, the ship carrying the standard measurements from France was captured by pirates.
Wake up babe! I know what we're gonna use our time machine for...
That's amazing, these pirates had a huge effect on history and probably didn't even know it or care.
Those pirates blew up our satellite!
Doesn’t seem to be an issue though, the decimetre is rarely used. Sometimes you find dL, decilitre, for 100 ml. It seems that 1, 100, and 1000 are convenient enough for most things.
Yeah, if you've got a measurement like 54 cm and you'd like that in decimeters for estimating how big it is, you literally just have to move the decimal point: 5.4 dm
You don't have to actively convert it to dm for that. You just see a number of cm and will immediately know how much it would be in steps of 10 cm...
It’s a decimal system, so t’s “all in 10th” deci=1/10. Meter > decimetre (dm) > centimetre (cm). So I think what you’re looking for is decimetre (dm) = tenth of a meter 😊
And centi denoting a factor of one hundredth and so on 🙃
Which is the „base“ for the litre: 1 cubic decimetre.
And originally it was defined as 1 kg water (under standard conditions), so 1000 L == 1 cubic meter == 1000 kg
Deci is actually 1/10. Deca is 10
Yup thnaks, was a typo 😊
Problem with a foot is, that it creates a reference, to well a human foot. But my feet are 11" whereas my gfs feet are 9.4" and my fathers feet are 12".
So four foot for my gf would be three foot for my dad. That is a terribly inaccurate references.
We used to have the same thing for cloth, where the length was measured with your underarm. Guess the shorter traders got rich off it.
And just as you noticed people are different sizes so would have people of the past. They weren't stupid or blind. Probably some room for haggling or less business, if you're trying to screw folks.
That's why we have decimeters...
Interestingly no one actually uses centimetres, in my line of work everything is measure in millimetres, even something over a metre. Average sheet steel size is 2400 x 1200 mm
I think a lot pf professionals that don't mind big numbers do it this way
Back in my middle school planks and beams of wood always had their length marked in mm. I've seen floor plans of houses and apartments in mm, tens of thousands of them without thousand separators!
In was just thinking of this video! There really are some legitimately good things about the imperial system, but metric is still better, but imo not quite enough better to take the work of converting everything in the country over to it