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Ah yes, the reason I am teaching myself as an American adult the metric system
It annoys me so much that a small decision could have had me growing up with metric.
I like metric weight for cooking (on the rare occasion I make something that involves careful measuring, and for my bread making) and MILES can fuck right off, km are fine for measuring long distance. And fine with meters, cm for short distance.
But I do like how feet are 12 inches, because 12 is so evenly divisible, and like that a gallon splits in half and half again and again until you get cups. It’s like RAM,
Cup is 8 oz
Pint is 16 oz
Quart is 32 oz
Half Gallon is 64 oz
Gallon is 128 oz.
That doubling sequence is satisfying.
specifically woodworking I like doing in inches, because 12. For the tasks I often do in the wood shop, fractional inches work well.
I’m confortable working in both systems, but I build furniture in inches.
Damn Tucker Carlson must’ve stumbled upon this post. Someone should tell him that Russians use metric.
I’m an American and every last bit of my shop is metric. It is the superior unit of measurement in every aspect. I don’t bother with imperial at all. If I have to list dimensions online in imperial, just multiply mm x 25.4 which gives me inches. That’s as far as Ill go into inches and feet.
I’ve said this before and Ill say it again, the US was robbed of the superior unit of measurement.
Thank you for your efforts!
Uh, I’m pretty sure you divide mm/25.4 to get inches.
Yes. I misspoke. Millimeters ÷ 25.4= inches. Inches x 25.4 = mm.
Sorry. I just thought it was funny in the context of a post about how it’s hard to remember all the conversions for imperial.
So, from my perspective, your experience gives me the exact opposite view. The fact is: no one is stopping us. Anyone in American can use metric any time they want. We use Imperial a significant amount of time because it’s useful. Feet and inches are related to body parts. Kilometers are too small for our giant country. I design surgical tools, and I use metric. I design buildings, and I use feet and inches.
I don’t really think it’s slowing us down to have more than one system.
Kilometers are too small for our giant country.
Fortunately for NASA, space is actually smaller than the USA. Otherwise km would be totally unworkable.
I’m guessing that you have to use meters instead of yards when designing tall buildings? Yards would be too small for most skyscrapers.
The reasonable reaction I’ve come to expect from Lemmy users.
One of the many failures of American public education system that I was subjected to. It’s speaks volumes about how normalized exceptionalism is in this country.
“Oh, the measurement standard the rest of the world uses? You don’t need to learn that. You’re an American, so people from other countries will just accomodate you because they want to be like us.”
I was taught the metric system in American elementary school.
One of the most annoying things in the world are American websites that claim to sell internationally but they only offer USD and all provided measurements are in American imperial.
Right up there with online stores that only have boxes for “state” and “zip code” even if the selected country doesn’t use those.
Americans are really falling behind these day in all the metrics 😂
We actually use both. Imperial is easier to break into 3rds, but can still break down into other bases easily without any irrational numbers. Metric is more useful for science, but my mom who does landscaping prefers Imperial for her designs because it’s not stuck in base-10.
Europeans are the ones who refuse to learn more than one system lol
Being purposefully stupid and arrogant about it is the single most American thing.
1g water == 1ml water ==
1cm^21cm^3 waterSquared centimeters for a volume measurement?
Oops! A mistake, of course
Their 2.5L bottles must be huge
Being a mechanical engineer in the US constantly switching between both systems really sucks. And for much more than just length and temperature
This could’ve been dealt with decades ago if people weren’t afraid of change.
How many British thermal units does it take to heat up a slug of water 1 degree Celsius?
As a brit, the only thing I care about is the extra 68ml I get in my pint.
I want to prefer imperial, but using fractions for tools is super fucking annoying when millimeters are easy, and then stores giving me price per ounce in the store, other products price per pound making me do the fucking Mental Math multiplying times 16 pisses me off.
Fractions are a stupid way to measure small distances, and ounces are a stupid way to measure it small amounts of weight.
It’s just a binary search
I could honestly care if Imperial wants to fuck men or women or both, I just don’t want it to be fucking annoying when I’m trying to do work.
But at the same time, fractions are actually a better way to measure precisely. If you need to record a precision that’s greater than a whole unit without being 10x as precise, decimal kinda sucks. If your precision is 1/8 a cm, you either have to round up or imply that the precision is accurate to 0.001 cm.
You can always play with a denominator to show greater precision with fractional measurements (1/8 vs 2/16 vs 8/64), but you can’t easily imply lower precision with decimal.
I do not agreed that fractions are a better way of measuring small distances. Decimals can be broken down infinitesimally. I don’t see anything hard to understand about it, meanwhile fractions you have to like compare and contrast the denominators to find the values or break out some long division or a calculator. Fuck that.
Okay.
How do you describe a measurement of 1 and a quarter of a centimeter precise to 1/4cm without either over-stating or under-stating precision of the measurement?
Decimal only allows you to increase or decrease precision by a factor of 10.
If the Precision is necessary you just break up two decimal points, or however many to get it to where it has to be.
You don’t need to use significant figures to convey precision. You can also explicitly state the uncertainty, like 1.25 ± 0.25 cm.
But even you don’t know how that works.
Because 1/4cm precision would be ± 0.125cm
Growing up in the Metric environment, I only have to deal with the Imperial system very rarely before the Internet. But later, I found out there’s a whole country that only use Imperial, and that they almost always demand you convert your system to the one they understand, and almost never bothered with Metric when they write anything. But then again, I found out that they also use units that are totally novel. I just have to accept that this is the character of them, and continue using Metric.
Probably. Because their understanding of metric is next to none. So they don’t even know what to convert it to. We also often take for granted with that we grow up with.
It wasn’t until I was 25 that I realized woodworking and sewing, isn’t part of the normal elementary school curriculum abroad.
It’s far from easy for someone that grew up in a different system to get a good reference of what different units feel like. It’s the kind of change you need multiple new generations for.
The only reference Americans have for metric is 9mm
There is no country that only uses Imperial. Americans use grams for weed. And technically what the US uses is called US Customary. Some units are different from Imperial. Funny thing is both Imperial and US Customary are legally defined in metric.
Yeah measures like a foot were never standardized across countries using imperial before napolean introduced metric, as the french foot was 13 inches or so, making napolean at least as tall as putin and not the 5 1 under that measure.
It’s because they believe they’re so exceptional that everything that works for the rest of the world doesn’t work for them.
That includes not only the metric system but also things like healthcare, student debt and gun control.
I’m having way too much fun with refusing to convert to or even learn that abomination of a system. Whenever a Murrican starts a conversation with inches, feet, ellbows or whatever I ask them what they mean and whether they can convert that to real units please.
Middle Earth?
Bring forth the ceremonial cudgels, it’s imperial units bashing time.
The chain (abbreviated ch) is a unit of length equal to 66 feet (22 yards), used in both the US customary and Imperial unit systems. It is subdivided into 100 links. There are 10 chains in a furlong, and 80 chains in one statute mile. In metric terms, it is 20.1168 m long.
ahhh good hit, that’s the stuff.
'Ow many stone does the chain weigh guv’nah?
I have a chip on my shoulder about the metric system as it appears in sci-fi writing.
It drives me nuts that in books like The Expanse (and I think the Bobiverse and Andy Wier’s works) that the writer will call distances in “thousands/millions of kilometers”.
Really feels more reasonable to just go full send and call them megameters and gigameters, but maybe that’s just my American non-metric mind trying to force full use of a system in a way those born to it don’t actually do.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
It’s certainly a good observation. I would agree that a more practical way of measuring the vast distances is to up the scale. Giga, Terra, whatever.
A kilometer in space is nothing. It must be the equivalent of saying “it’s only a million millimeter drive away”
Megameters just is fun to say, we could make it a thing, if enough use it it becomes proper.
I’m onboard. Let’s get rid of the tonne also. Megagram sounds way cooler.
There we go imperial-y again, with distance to sun, distance based on angle to gobbledigook, and what not.
Everytime I see one of these posts I have to make the same comment. The US is metric, everywhere that it matters. In the military, in the medical field, and in the scientific field. The ONLY reason we haven’t converted every other part of our lives to metric is that our country is 50 times the size of the average European country. Do you know how expensive it would be to replace the infrastructure we’ve built and maintained over the past 200 years? The tax payers could not handle that burden, and it would require every state to agree to the terms of the change for a total conversion.
At this point, it is just part of our identity. It would be like asking the French to eat day old bread. They could, but why?
I have seen US companies try, but it is so slow.
We did customs tooling. In the 80s 90s it was inch sizing and inch components. Late 90s still inch tooling but Metric components, and so drawings would have REAM for .236 Dowel ( instead of 6mm) LOL In mid 2000s tooling was metric sized as long as it was close to a purchasable inch size from the steel foundary. So block would be 608mm wide, to order a 24" block.
So 2025 mostly you can see places working full metric.
Then there are places I have worked recently that still use Fractional inch on projects and then wonder why assembly problems arise. Like design intent is 8.541 and maybe clearance to adjacent part has to be .039". Drawing has 8 9/16 + 1/32, so not only is sizing wrong compared to mating part, the fractional inch means dude uses a tape measure by eye, rather than a 3 place decimal measure tool. It’s such a mess.
It’s also that imperial uses body measurements for basic stuff. Your foot is about a foot long, so you can pace off distances. One yard is about the length from your collarbone to the opposite wrist, so I can roughly measure fabric quickly. From your fingertip to the crook of your thumb is about five inches, and the knuckles on your fingers are about an inch apart.
I used to do industrial embroidery at an immigrant-owned shop, and the boss switched from metric to imperial because measuring a couple inches with your fingers is faster than finding a meter stick and measuring centimeters exactly. When you’ve got multiple inches in your margin for error, there is no need for the precision of metric, and the speed of imperial just makes more sense.
