Technically the metric system is "the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce" as per the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.
You're just also allowed to use lbs and feet and stuff and most people do.
The versions of imperial measurements the US uses are even defined in terms of metric units, so they're less a completely separate measurement system these days and more just a weird facade on top of metric, even.
And in the sciences and drug dealing and the military, we use metric exclusively.
But for some idiotic reason, construction engineers often use imperial units and I have no idea why. Like buildings are built in pounds and feet and stuff, with half inch bolts and 2x4 (ish) lumber and half inch plywood. It’s idiotic.
I don't generally defend imperial, but feet and inches are actually really useful in construction. Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 4, and 3. You often need to divide architectural elements in thirds.
I was a welder for years and I have to disagree. Using millimeters is way easier than inches, mostly because decimals are faster and easier to use than fractions. And it's not that hard to divide 10 by 2, 3, or 4.
As a former structural engineer who lived on a Jobber 5 all day, that's still pretty niche overall. Easier because it's what your used to maybe, but outweighed by situations where it's not. Try doing trig with fractions and then tell me imperial is better.
In this thread: people bending over backwards to defend their insane, non-logical unit of measurement
Logical, mathematically convenient, but not practically convenient. Without a measuring tool, there's no good way to estimate anything besides a centimeter.
Every imperial unit of measure can be estimated whilst naked (but preferably clothed).
An inch is your distal thumb phalanx. A foot is your foot. A mile is, or was at one point, roughly 1,000 paces.
The weather can be estimated by going outside. Is it too hot? It's in the upper third of the 100 degree scale. Too cold? Lower third, might snow. Cool enough to fully dress, but not too cold, right in the middle.
A healthy, big person is about 200 lbs. A very small person is about 100 lbs.
Converting between these units is useful in science, which is why science uses metric. But you could live your entire life on earth and never need to know how many distal phanages are in 1,000 paces. It literally never comes up. Who cares?
It's why units are divided into fractions, rather than into a decimal system.
By the way, the only reason we use a base 10 numbering system in the first place is because we have ten fingers and it was easier for early mathematicians to count. But I digress.
If you're dividing a length of rope, and all you have is the rope, it's simple to divide it in half, and then half again, and then again in half. You could even divide into thirds, if you were feeling frisky. You just fold it over itself until the lengths are even. There are two friendly numbers that are difficult to do that with, though. Can you guess what they are? If you guessed 5 and 10, you nailed it, good job.
Same with piles of grain or hunks of beef or chunks of precious metals.
But what about units of volume, you ask? I don't have a part of my body that holds roughly 8 oz of fluid to pour out. No, for that you'll need a cup. Just a cup. Not a graduated cup with a bunch of little lines down the side. 1 cup. Or half a cup, or a third, or maybe a quarter cup. Again, easily divisible for easy measuring without any special tools.
But a gallon, you protest. A gallon is 16 cups! What the fuck is 16 cups good for? Why not 10 or 100, or create a decigallon for simple math? Because 16 can be divided in half 4 times. Measuring out portions of the whole is as simple as pouring out equal portions into similarly sized containers. Divisible numbers are easier to use without graduated equipment.
And that's why time is measured in 24 hours, each hour is 60 minutes, each minute is 60 seconds. There's a ton of history there, and we'll ignore for this discussion the inaccuracy of measuring a day or a year. If the metric system is entirely superior, why don't you demand we all switch to metric time? A year will still be roughly 365 days (again, setting aside the inaccuracy) but we could divide the day into 10 equal metric hours, or mours, and those mours into 100 metric minutes, or metrinutes, and then those metrinutes into 100 metric seconds, or meconds. 1 mecond would be 0.864 seconds, and a metrinute would be 1.44 minutes, which to most people would be an imperceptible difference in time. Hey, how many seconds is 1.44 minutes? You don't know without a calculator because we don't use metric for time, and it probably never bothered you once before now. What an insane, non-logical unit of measure time is.
Yes, metric let's us convert millimeters to kilometers, or helps us determine how many calories it take increase 1 cubic centimeter of water by 10 degrees kelvin. It helps with those things because the units are arbitrarily defined to make the math easier, not to make the measurement easier. But that's it, there's no additional sanity, no additional logic. It's easier to convert between units via math, because it was designed to be easier to convert between units via math. There are no additional benefits to the metric system.
This is either a way too elaborate troll or one of the dumbest things I have ever read and I can't figure out which it is.
A foot is a foot. Fantastic. Glad to know everyone has the same sized feet.
And the same length on their legs so we all pace the same distance.
I would say good troll, but it just seems too long to be ironic.
I feel like a lot of this is based on what you grew up with and you eventually related it to something to make it easier for you.
Like a cm is the width of a fingernail. A dm(10cm) is the size of a middle finger. 100m is 1 minute of walking. I know 1 metre is my normal stride.
Is it too hot? 30s. Is it cold? Less than 10. Is there snow? Less than 0. Is it cool enough to fully dress but not too cold? Around 20.
Big person? 100kg. Small person? 50kg.
The point is that you can make any system relatable.
Absolutely incredible copypasta
Alternatively, people insisting that Americans must be math gods for using such a demanding and archaic system.
Ah nice, this should be a constructive dialogue between open minded and empathetic individuals.
grabs popcorn
When my American friends insist that feet and inches is just easier for them, I just nod in agreement and give them measurements using rods, chains and furlongs as well. If you're going to go Imperial, you have to know 'em all. An acre is a chain by a furlong, totally logical as that would be 4x40 rods which is of course 43560 square feet. I guess it makes complete sense when your world is only a few furlongs across.
I've worked in both, and if precision isn't as important as accuracy feet and inches, and only feet and inches, can be easier. A third of a foot is 4 inches, yay whole numbers. A third of a meter is 33.33 cm. Way harder to measure and calculate on the fly. If anything I'm working on has measurements or tolerances under a quarter of an inch, I prefer metric.
A truly logic system would be entirely designed around a base-12 number system. But we were born with an imperfect set of 10 fingers and that doomed us.
Those aliens have 6 fingers. It's an absolutely ironic twist that their discussion on measuring systems is super illogical for them, and yet logical is the verbiage they use.
Care to elaborate on how base 12 would be better than base 10 in this case?
Basically it's because 12 is more divisible than 10. Factors of 10 are 1,2,5 and 10. 12 has 1,2,3,4,6 and 12. This gives more flexibility when discussing numbers. Our time is technically using base 12, which is why we can say quarter past 4 and it means a traditional whole number. That's the argument I've heard anyway
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.
A foot is convenient size for most things.
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.
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.
how about we all agree that the best system is american units with metric prefixes. After all it is obvious that it takes an hours to drive 318 kilofeet
When I find a wood working video on YouTube from the states it blows my mind how anyone can not just adopt metric “This is 5” 4/57 and we need to cut it to 5” 5/45 and a half” bzzzzzzz.
I may be biased, but I think it kinda makes sense. All the fractions are really just powers of two:
One half
One quarter
One eighth
One sixteenth
One thirtysecond
etc.
Oh yeah, totally makes more sense to say "it's 3/64ths of an inch" than "it's 2 millimeters." Completely reasonable.
So reasonable, in fact, that in most manufacturing that still uses imperial measurements they long ago abandoned fractions and moved to decimal inches.
Which leads to unholy abominations such as the wood shop sending over "cut off 3/64ths" and the metal shop cutting off 0.046875".
"Why do they use the much more complicated system?" "Nobody actually knows."
Those aliens have 3 fingers. A decimal system to them is like a system based on 14, 196, 2744, 38416, ... would be like to us - probably worse than US Customary
14, 196, 2744, 38416, … would be like to us - probably worse than US Customary
I mean if they had a base 14 numerical system then a base 14 measurement system would make perfect sense.
Contrary to that, the US does use a decimal system for numbers while the various units in the US customary system do not have any common base.
Silly Americans, you could be measuring your winnies in GIGAMETERS and yet decide to keep using the kings thumb as a reference for it*
Base 12 is way more logical than base 10, I bet aliens would think we're stupid for counting in base 10 just because we have 10 fingers, my opinion on this is infallible fight me
Oh my god get a new joke. The U.S. uses both systems just like everyone else.
You are funny. Most places do not use "both". They use metric and... Sometimes they switch to metric for good measure (hah!). To believe that the whole world does the old convert around is confirming another US stereotype (everyone else is like we are and that's a given) while you try to get us to stop mocking us stereotypes. Oh the irony!
You don't use both, or at least, surely you mean "both" for cases where you are forced, like me by American online stores. And this joke won't stop until you get rid of that shitty system.
I find imperial vs metric to be a question of practicality vs ideality, and as an engineer I tend towards the former. Either way it doesn't really matter, because unit conversions are easy math, and a good engineer can work in any unit system.
In defense of imperial, to balance things out here:
I almost never need to go from inches to feet to yards to miles. Conversions like that play almost no role in my daily life. Easily going from mm to cm to m to km is a solution in need of a problem.
Because imperial isn't bound by a constant conversion factor, you can use several points of reference. An inch is about the size of one knuckle. A foot is roughly the size of... A foot. Most of the time, I don't need anything more than this. Although to be fair, I rarely need this even. Smaller than an inch is all metric though, easily.
Imperial is sometimes more convenient. Twelve seems like an usual number for inches to feet, but twelve is also easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. I can instantly convert from fractional feet to inches for the most common fractions.
I'm going to say it, both temperature scales make sense. Celsius being based on water makes a lot of sense, it's the most ubiquitous substance. Fahrenheit makes sense too in terms of climate and the weather that people experience -- it's harder to go more simple than 0 = very cold and 100 = very hot.
Conversions actually aren't universally good for metric. Joules are great for abstract concepts, but not so much more realistic matters. The energy required to raise 1 g of water by 1 deg C is 4.184 Joules -- or more simply, 1 calorie. Calorie is actually neither imperial nor metric. Metric here loses the intuitiveness of water, while SI takes a big W. Another example, mass and weight. In metric, 1 kg is 9.8 Newtons. Most places don't bother with Newtons and stick to kg. In imperial, 1 pound mass is 1 pound weight. They have been set equal to each other by definition. Mass to weight calculations will always be much easier in imperial, and that's rather nice for looking at chemistry and flowrates and equipment requirements.
Imperial is better for K-12 education, another unpopular opinion. It requires children to learn going from inches to feet to yards, which uses math far more regularly than metric does. For lengths, it's great for teaching fractions. Unit conversions between systems are taught often, which gives students a basis when you're converting other units, like moles and kilograms in chemistry.
It teaches you to always label your fucking units. It's incredibly bad engineering practice to do this, even if you work solely in one unit system, because you almost certainly aren't using just one unit. Hell when it comes to pressure, with kPa, psi, atmospheres, and bar, it really doesn't matter what unit system you're using.
Metric defines some units in a way that's good for science but bad for everyday life. A pascal is 1 newton of force per square meter. Our atmosphere is 101,125 Pascals. You see kPa used constantly because the defined unit is absurdly small. The same goes for a Joule, it's the work done to move a 1 newton object 1 meter. Chemical reaction energy is measured on the basis of kJ per mole (or kg). The defined unit is really small.
TLDR: Convenience + Practicality vs Ideality + Logic
The only thing I still like Fahrenheit for is temperature. There's a wider range for the human livable temperature, so you get more persision. For everything else metric all the way.
And yes, it's 100% my American brain can't figure it out in Celcius no matter how hard I try lmao. 10's are chill, 20's are nice, 30's sind heiß. But in the end, I end up thinking Fahrenheit and going from there every time.
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