this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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There are people in the US who will fight tooth and nail to defend the imperial system, as if it's superior in some way. It just doesn't make sense to me. It's harder to learn, completely inconsistent, and unlike standard metric, there is no scientific basis for the measurements. They're just random distances that someone made up.
Tell me, what's easier to remember? 0°C or 32°F? 100°C or 212°F? 1000m = 1km or 5280ft = 1mi
It's actually kinda weird that they use dollars and cents and not pounds, shillings, pennies and farthings, because that feels much more compatible with the imperial way of thinking.
You're right actually, when you think about it $1 being 100 cents is basically communism. $1 should be 57.93 cents
I think even using decimals like that seems un-American, because I've always been told that fractions are what makes imperial so easy. Everyone loves calculating fractions after all, so perhaps a cent should be 1/37th of a dollar.
Imperial basically developed by picking a useful measure at each given scale.
For example, a mile was originally 1000 paces, and wasn't standardized at all. The first Roman legion to march down a road would stick mile markers down based on the length of their stride.
A furlong was one agricultural furrow long - the distance you'd plow with your Ox.
A foot was originally someone's literal foot.
It's inconsistent for the same reason a meter doesn't go neatly into a light year. That doesn't make it good, but it's a very human system of units.
At the very least get the history right. Fahrenheit was defined so that a temperature stable brine solutions temperature was zero, because it was easy to create for calibration, and that the freezing and boiling points of water would be 180° apart, because circles and temperature gauges have a natural link.
Redefinition of the scale to make it line up with metric has led to some minor drift in the definition.
The good criticism of fahrenheit is that it's non standard, not that it doesn't have round numbers for two states of one substance.