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But it’s really easy. Wanna know how many inches are in a mile? One inch is 0.0254 m. One mile is 1609.344 m. 1609.344 / 0.0254 is 63360. There.
But what if there are no inches in that mile, only yards? Or parsec? Oh, wait…
or just eagle elbows
i tooked astronomy in college a while ago, to know how long is 1 parsec.
I’ve never wanted to know how many of any unit are in a mile. It’s just something I’ve never had reason to care about. So there’s 1000 meters in a kilometer. That’s just trivia to me. There’s no need to know that.
I always assumed 1km = 0.6 miles because all all of the car guys yapping about 0-100 and 0-60. Good enough, tbh. Inch is 2.5cm, and there are 12 of them in a foot for some reason. Pint is slightly less than half a liter, pound is slightly less than half a kilo, and anyone mentioning stones gets stoned to death. Simple enough.
Just wait until you try to understand American cooking recipes. Cups everywhere! My favorite was “A cup of spinach”, without any mentioning if they were talking about fresh spinach (losely or densily packed) or cooked/frozen one.
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.
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.
Could it possibly be because your argument is shit?
Kilometers are too small for our giant country.
Kilometers aren’t the biggest measurement in metric though.
It goes: Kilometer x1000= Megameter x1000= Gigameter x1000= Terameter. A Terameter is about 1012 meter
Just as it goes smaller like: Milimeter /1000= Micrometer /1000= Nanometer /1000= Picometer
And even those are still not the biggest or smallest measurements possible in metric.
That’s true in theory, but if you talk about megameters to a European you’ll get very weird looks.
An engineer will understand what you mean, but still laugh at you.
But it’s a non-issue for anything on earth, where you’ll have 40.000 kilometers at most. Not a lot of time is spent talking about x thousand kilometer.
Any notion that a kilometer is “too small” is laughable.
I don’t really think it’s slowing us down to have more than one system
Say that to the Mars Climate Orbiter
You still have to know which system you’re using, obviously.
Which would not ever be an issue if you knobheads just switched to metric.
Lol. Dude, with all due respect, did you skip breakfast or something? First, body parts? Take a drink of water, please. You’re dehydrated. Also, although I agree imperial isn’t completely useless, one of its strengths is not because the size of the contental United States. It’s not like miles and kilometers are orders of magnitude different when measuring an identical distance. Lightyears and astronomical units are terrible units to use to describe a drive from LA to NYC for this reason, but is it really that big if a deal between choosing miles and kilometers? I don’t see it that way.
The main reason why I use metric with my work is because I commonly deal in millimeters / sub-inches. If I used inches, everything would be shitty fractions and I hate fractions. To me, metric is just cleaner when increasing or decreasing magnitudes. Which I generally stay within cm and mm.
Within industrial applications, such a building a structure in the US, yeah, it makes sense to stick ti imperial because it is indeed the national unit of measurement. But outside that reason, I don’t find much of a benefit. Coincidentally, I moved off grid 3 weeks ago and am building a cabin way out in the woods. Because its just me and I plan to stay here until my end, I’ll definitely use metric. If I was just developing a place I intended to flip, I’d use Imperial singularly because I’m in the US.
Ad hominim attacks. The bread and butter of Lemmy.
I don’t think you read my response. I wasn’t attacking you at all. I’m not one of those mean shits on here. I certainly meant no aggression.
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.
Thank you for your efforts!
What temperature is the shop kept at?
Fahrenheit. Switching to Kelvin soon, tho. For shop temp accuracy!
Yeah but can we talk about time?
Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time. ...It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion. … —Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living.As quoted in the GNU coreurils documentation for date input formats
The units are complicated because our world is complicated. The moon orbits the earth in a certain interval, the earth orbit the sun and the earth revolves around itself. Those are the major points of reference but none of them line up.
Best of all, none of those natural reference values are constant. They drift gradually, and lunar months won’t be 30 days forever just like a day won’t be 24 hours in the future.
Hmm, I wonder… our current standard of time might end up being the standard for a long time, primarily because of GPS. Before we had global data networks it wasn’t really possible to syncronize clocks all around the world. There used to be a telephone service that you could dial which would tell you “The time is now eight fifty-five PM” or w/e because that was the most effective way to distribute a coordinated time signal, and then you could manually set your local clock/watch to match.
But GPS depends heavily on accurate time information, and keeping it accurate is very complicated. Relativitistic time dilation applies because the satellites are:
- far enough away from Earth (~20000km) that they experience different gravity than devices on Earth’s surface, causing local time for the satellite to be be faster, and
- moving so fast in their orbit that they experience a measurable slowing of local time.
(that’s right, using GPS on your phone is a real-world demonstration of the theory of relativity in practical effect)
…and all those satellites are constantly checking in with each other and ground stations to make sure they’re in agreement.
As a result there is now a de facto standard time reference for the entire world, and all networked devices depend on it for their own timing, and it is accurate to microseconds at worst.
100 years ago people were still winding mechanical clocks every day, and setting them by the local churchbell.
Yep. This stuff is surprisingly complicated, and that’s why we need to measure the day using a standardized unit instead of defining the unit with the day.
Incidentally, Wikipedia has a nice graph about the variation of the length of day. It’s surprisingly messy and pretty far from the ideals of antiquity.
Planck second is constant.
The lunar month is currently ~29.5306 days (synodic, on average). Some day in the future (probably in a few million years), the average synodic moon cycle will reach 30 days (it is slowing down) - if, and that is a big if - we keep the current definition of “second” and “day”, because both the length of the day as well as the lenght of the year will have changed…
I suggest we switch to Planck based units. Just slap on a suitable multiplier to make the final unit practical in normal life and engineering. Basically like the mol unit but with a more precise and natural foundation.
If the fundamental constants of the universe aren’t exactly constant, we’re screwed and there are no good units.
The way we split them is still purely arbitrary though. We could have metric time that uses multiples of 10 just by adjusting the duration of a second accordingly and adjusting how we divide time in a day.
Days of the calendar would be more challenging. But it’s still possible to make something much more workable I’m sure of it.
Have a look at the international fixed calendar, used by kodak internally until 1989. 13 months of 28 days, it looks so clean
Everything months starts a Sunday (I’d rather start weeks on Monday but whatever), every second Monday is the 9th. Plus it has the advantage of keeping the 7 days week we’re used to. Software excluded, it looks easy to adopt.
Alternatively there was the French revolutionary calendar with 10 days weeks and 12 months
with 10 days weeks
But what is the week for, if not to measure work and rest days? With that in mind, 8 days (5 work, 3 rest) would be ideal.
When the metric system was defined and adopted during the French revolution they changed the calendar as well.
Months were changed to be 30 days each with an extra 5-6 days at the end of the year, weeks were 10 days long, days were 10 hours of 100 minutes, each minute lasted 100 seconds.
Unfortunately it did not stick and the decimal time system was reverted.
Being purposefully stupid and arrogant about it is the single most American thing.
Then there’s my favorite cursed unit: the kip! 1 kip=1000 lbs. “Kip” is short for “kilo-pounds.” It’s a unit used frequently in American civil and structural engineering. And it is so deliciously cursed.
It’s also about 31 slugs.
Fun fact: the SI (international system of units) actually defines a multiplier “Ki”, but it is not a factor of 1000. A Kisomething is 1024 something. As in 1KiB = 1024B (Kilobytes resp. Bytes).
As in 1KiB = 1024B (Kilobytes resp. Bytes)
Isn’t it even more convoluted than this?
Doesn’t KiB translate to Kibibytes? Because “kilo” is 1000 (powers of 10).
Kibi is 1024, the “bi” is supposed to mean “binary”, or powers of 2.
Yes, a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a kibibyte is 1024 bytes. But almost always when talking about kilobytes, kibibytes are implied. Except when they aren’t.
Kihex?
Back in the early days of telephones at&t used kft to measure lines. Yes that is kilofoot
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.”
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
Just came here to nit-pick that the metric prefix for 103 is k and not K.
Case in point: Platinum melts around 2kK.
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.
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.
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
The only reference Americans have for metric is 9mm
Way to show your ignorance. We also buy our soda in liters.
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.
Middle Earth?
In the US, we should make things even more confusing to anger the metric folks. I propose we redefine the “foot” every four years. The length of the foot will always correspond to the actual measured foot length of the current US president.
the fact that you think this will anger metric folks who already don’t make sense of your dumb system rather than ruin many aspects of your country … uh … never mind, you’re already ruining many aspects of country. ignore what I was going to say. carry on.
What if we defined a foot such that a cubic food of some good, say potatoes or something, is a specific amount of money. So it’s tied to inflation.
We should bring back hogsheads, rods, fathoms, etc.
IIRC some of those crazy units are still referenced in certain laws of old…
What a wondefull idea!
Ugh. Kelvingram again.
💔
but at least there’s a space
Can anyone with a deeper understanding of the history of the metric system explain why a gram is the base unit of weight, and a litre the base unit of volume?
I thought the foundation of the system was that a kilogram is the weight of a litre of water. But then why not name them 1 thing = 1 thing rather than 1000x a thing = 1 thing.
And yes I’ve had four cups of coffee and no sleep today.
That’s an interesting question that I’d never thought about before.
I asked chatGPT, which predictably bullshitted me and said they’d decided grams made more sense than kilograms for scientific lab work.
But then I searched and found this from the user tomalator on Reddit:
“When the French were developing the metric system, they suggested the unit be called a grave (pronounced grav) being the mass of 1L of water (1000 cm3)
The French at this time being in the middle of a revolution against the rich notice that it sounded a lot like the word Graf, being a word for Duke or Earl, and they wanted to avoid affiliating with the nobility, so they changed the measurement to be the mass of 1mL of water (1 cm3) and called it the gramme
They then noticed that it was inconvenient to use a mass unit so small, so they changed back to the 1L of water definition, but kept the name gramme for the base, and threw out the word grave in favor of the kilogramme.
And that’s why the kilogram is the base SI unit and not the gram. I had the exact same question when I learned the SI unites.”
First they defined the meter and then one litre was defined as one dm^3.
4 cups, you have had a quart of coffee, sir ;)
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Should be pretty easy to learn, right? I mean, that’s the whole point.
except for intuition formed from a lifetime of daily usage
We were taught it in my rural red state elementary school in the '80s. Maybe because metrification seemed like a more real possibility, I guess.
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Amerifats cant get over their imperialist england brain to work in tandem with rest of the world. It creates just enough division and tribality between the world the US to justify its colonial nature and settlement enterprise in the americas.
You cant bury your disgusting history.
Yes, the US is trying to sow discord in the world with it’s choice of measurement system in order to further its imperialist agenda.
Nevermind the documented instances of US government military intervention and collusion with far right-wing groups to disrupt popular leftist movements and governments across the world. It’s the measurement system that’s the problem.
You are being insidious. This also contributes to the main directives. It wasnt JUST THIS.
People dont hate Trump because he is orange. But it definitely doesnt fucking help it either.
Or teams dont choose green as their team color because it helps them win more. But having these features helps with the morale.
Jesus Christ, you’re broken.
Yes, morale is at an all time over here because some Anglophile chose Imperial as our weight and measurement standards 200+ years ago.
By the way, we all have horns and rub our hands together evilly and cackle when a European is inconvenienced by an American website.
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.
Your 16 oz pints are a pathetic 455ml. Europeans have 500ml.
Meanwhile a true UK pint is 568ml.
You can see why we cling to Imperialism.
Damn Tucker Carlson must’ve stumbled upon this post. Someone should tell him that Russians use metric.
