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.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
Does it matter whether you punch 3/8 or .375 into a calculator? Don’t tell me you calculate stuff by hand…
Trig is literally the math where you start dividing a circle in fractions and doing the math in base 360.
What the hell are you talking about?
I'm talking about trig using feet and inches. You know, rise, run, slope... Have you ever used trig outside of school? I don't understand what you're confused about.
right now i use it for waves and reflections. that's all fractions and degrees. before it was machining and tbh for me that was faster to go to the book for the answers than calculate everything out.
truly trigonometry is a land of contrasts.
That might be somewhat useful if it was consistently applied, which it is not.
And it’s maybe useful for fractions, but how many feet are in a mile again? 5280? A square yard is what now… 1296 square inches?! Who the fuck is supposed to memorize all that?
What’s a 1/4 square yard in square inches?
That’s not easy, that’s putting the mental into mental arithmetic.
Again people making me defend imperial, I think metric is better.
I see this argument all the time, converting between these units is hard cause the numbers are weird. You have to stop thinking about imperial as a system, it's not. No one should convert miles to feet, they are not intended to measure on the same scale.
None of the conversions are easy because imperial is just a random collection of units that were being used to measure different things.
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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.
Screw that, we'll make them use Metric. BY FORCE!
Yep, that's what Napoleon did...
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Regan also never bothered to reinstate Imperial standards at the bureau of weights and measures (because it would have cost a small fortune). So our units are officially defined by the their metric counterpart. Legally speaking an inch is 2.54 centimeters.
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.
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
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
It's not entirely without logic. Base 12 is actually better that base 10 for a start, as it allows for a lot more fractions that have clean representations, so 12 inches in a foot is fine. The next thing is that people seem to think we have all of these strange units with strange conversions, when in reality we have 3 units for short distances, and then a seperate unit for long distances. 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and then nobody cares how long a mile is in terms of feet or yards. Once you realize that the mile is not even really part of the same measuring system as inches, feet and yards, the weird conversion makes sense. We exclusively use miles to talk about long distances above 0.1 miles, and then yards are used below 500 yards (which has an overlap of 324 yards). And then for the logic, it is entirely based on actual human scale shit. A foot is called a foot because it is roughly the size of your foot. A yard is approximately how long one stride is. Saying something is 100 yards away means it is approximate 100 steps away. Obviously there will be a bit of variance for how accurate that will be for any given person (and children will have to base it off of an adult obviously), but because it is based more on human things it is more useful for measuring human scale things. It was designed to not use decimals or large numbers because humans don't comprehend those very well.
Yes very logical, much intuitive
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
There are some places that do use a base 12 number system.
Again, I wasn't defending it, just explaining it.
Ah nice, this should be a constructive dialogue between open minded and empathetic individuals.
grabs popcorn
Everyone focuses on why learning metric would be better in the first place, and they're right. No one has come up with a good argument for me to throw away all of my measuring tools, convert all my recipes and relearn an entirely new system when the system and stuff I have works for me now.
Because it will make life easier for people coming after you, your kids off you have some or the generation after you.
If you don't do it then they will have to do it or suffer the difficulty of the imperial system.
Because otherwise it will be difficult to live in a country that has converted to metric, presumably. While I'm not pushing for us to change to metric (even though I know it would be good), I suspect the change would be fairly easy to adjust to.
This attitude is exactly WHY the US failed to actually convert back in the 70s
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.
What makes you think Farenheit is more precise for "human liveable" temperatures?
The temperature is the same. Regardless of which unit you use to document it in.
Which is why I think any argument between Celsius and Fahrenheit is completely arbitrary.
Like, the temperature that water melts and boils is completely dependant on pressure. If I follow a recipe I'll use the temp they recommend. My computer's heart gauge uses Celsius. I don't need to know what it is in Fahrenheit to know if it's overheating.
I am not familiar with fahrenheit, but celsius and kelvin allow for decimals. You can have as much precision as you like
I'm going to blow your mind, then.
Look up the human body temperature in Fahrenheit.
Turns out all ways of measuring temperature are linear and equally accurate. All of them have decimals.
I hoped ypu would have noted the sarcasm in the tone of my message. Of course every system has decimals.
Nope! Your fault for making a bad joke. Make it more obvious for idiots next time time.
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
There's no good way to predict what base they'd actually use for their numbers, but there's definitely nothing about 10 that makes it an obvious choice for an inter-species standard line the comic implies.
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In this thread: people bending over backwards to defend their insane, non-logical unit of measurement
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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.
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