- cross-posted to:
- Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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What about a nautical mile?
Not in defense of the imperial system, but if you’re curious why it’s so arbitrary, it’s a crazy story about untangling a ton of proprietary guild measurements. The mile itself isn’t quite proprietary (it was defined as 8 furlongs, and you can blame the English for ruining a perfectly good roman measurement) but they needed to make it a certain number of chains, rods, yards, and feet, plus a few other obscure measurements I forget about. Naturally that results in a stupid conversation rate (mostly vs yards and feet since it was basically a different system).
Why we still use it, dunno. I can see an argument for keeping feet and inches for things like carpentry (in the similar way I like hexadecimal in programming) but miles is not that. It’s about as logical as this point as fahrenheit, which is to say it’s outdated nonsense.
To me, Fahrenheit is a lot like inches and feet for carpentry. As in it’s fine for things like describing the weather and setting my house’s thermostat. It mostly falls apart for must other things, though it’s still okay for cooking and baking. From a scientific perspective, any temperature scale that isn’t zero at absolute zero is nonsense, so it’s pretty much Kelvin or bust.
In traditional carpentry inches and feet make sense because of the high divisibility. We don’t get as much benefit from that now though.
We still use hex with computers because that’s what they’re made using (rather binary, but hex is just a natural group of binary digits). The usage of binary is ultimately more grounded in the objective than the usage of base 10 in the SI system. Nature dictates the relationships between the units, but we pick the quantities so it works out to a nice base 10 set of ratios.
Base 2 naturally arises when dealing with information theory that underpins a lot of digital computing.Say what you will about the imperial system, but you can pry binary, octal, and hex from my cold dead hands.
Arguing with the imperial system is like arguing with my mother. She knows her ways and methods are insane, but she will try to explain why she needs each of those eight furlongs. Either ADHD will steal her ability to finish the explanation or the audience will perish from exhaustion. And she still will be the smartest person in the room.
You don’t have to use it though. Reject it.
Why not just keep it simple and use the 5.4 microseconds * speed of light approximation? People just love making things overly complicated.
Especially when you just set c = 1
I wish we had a metric inch because the fuzziness can be useful.
“How small do you need these veggies diced?”
“2.5cm ish” vs. “about an inch”I feel like the implied margin of error is much larger for inches, which make them useful for many things where precision isn’t necessarily desirable (hemming, wargaming, moving furniture, etc…). If I’m wargaming having a limit on rounding is useful (half an inch - either round up or down), assuming I’m playing at a scale that uses inches.
Feet I have no use for, with one exception - adult human height between 5’ 2" and 6’ 2". There I find metric too precise (whereas to the nearest inch accounts for variance in sole thickness, hair volume, etc.).
I wasn’t raised on imperial (and I’m baffled that people younger than me in the UK still talk about stones. Sixteen stone is fat, sure, but I’ve no idea how fat if not told in kilos) but I find inches to have their uses.
Also miles for cars - because common speeds are ~60 and ~30 mph so a road sign effectively gives the time to arrival (e.g. 13 miles on a motorway = about 13 minutes). I don’t use them for actually measuring distance on a map but they’re handy when driving.
We kind of do have metric inches, insofar as machinists work in 'thou’s (thousands of an inch) But that’s kind of specialist
Thousandths of an inch are also used in some engineering applications and are called “mils.” Not to be confused with millimeters.
Why not say ‘2-3 cm’ for the first one? Or ‘a couple centimeters’? It doesn’t feel too different from saying ‘about an inch’ to me
It’s to do with how I think about numbers, rounding, and margins of error. I don’t know how to express that better, I’m sorry.
I was not raised using inches for anything. It’s not a cultural thing, it’s a use case I’ve found them useful for.
Taking it even further who the fuck uses inches or cms for vegetable cutting measurements anyway, it’s like, one or two fingers thick
Recipes I use regularly say “2cm chunks” and the like. I’ve never seen one measure in fingers.
Do you want to develop imperial measurements? Because that’s how you invent imperial measurements. Next thing you know you’ve got a cup that’s really good for measuring liquids and a couple spoons you like to scoop with…
We are talking about cutting vegetables maybe meat, the room for error is enormous…
Oh, certainly. I just enjoyed that, in a thread about the vagueness and oddness of the imperial system, the suggestion came up to use a casual approximation for the inch instead of the word “inch”.
Why not make it even more ambiguous by specifying the desired cutting width in “circumference of my dick”.
That’s too thin
Would that be flacid dick inches or erect dick inches?
Sure.
Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. “One thou sand”.
Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.
The only metric to imperial conversion I remember is kilometers to miles since it’s pretty close to the golden ratio.
Even if you don’t remember that the golden ratio is 1.6 and a bit, you can approximate it by using successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …
So 8 miles is about 13km (actually 12.87)
Its 2.54 cm to the inch. Its close to 2.5 and as an engineer in America I am stuck doing that conversion a lot
If it makes you feel any better, most pipe standards around the world are based on the American system, as well as bloody valve coefficients.
I am far too aware that 1" is 25.4 mm :(
And I’m in Australia. Grumble
This has blown my mind
Fucking Dan Brown in the comment section
Lmao your username is awesome
and your username is scary
You should use a rolling release distro and always update to the bleeding edge.
You will not regret using a rolling release distro and always updating to the bleeding edge.
It is not easier for me to sneak backdoors into your system when you are using a rolling release distro and are always updating to the bleeding edge.
🙂
Thank you, kind stranger on the internet!
You’re welcome, @VolumetricShitCompressor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 💖
Forma me it’s the yard. It’s so close to the meter its ridiculous. I just ignore the difference an treat as the same. One yard = 0.9144 meters
A yard is about 1.4 litres in my book, or 2.1/2 pints - imperial pints mind, not US ones. I’m not ignoring away that 20% difference; it’s bad enough with all the fucking “pint to brim” glasses these days.
Liters? Pints? How are you converting from distance to volume?
A yard of ale is a large beer glass, based on a glass that is quite long probably less than a metre.
Hope you meant hat the glass is tall
A meter is a Baker’s yard. 3 free inches!
I usually just go with 1.5 because adding half/subtracting a third is way easier to do in my head, and I’m not worried about a ~10% error in casual conversation.
I just go with 1.6 because its still easy enough to do in your head.
Eg. 60mi = 60 + (60/2) + (60/10) = 96km
2.2 pounds per kilogram. For a rough conversion just multiply or divide by two. For a more precise conversation do the same thing, then wiggle a decimal and do it again.
Imagine being so close minded and bad at math that you can only think in base 10 and feel the constant need to degrade people who are good at math in different bases
The feet to mile conversion is still in base-10… Its the ratios between the units that are seemingly arbitrary. Come on…
This comment brought to you by a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to use a different base numeral
You dont write the number of feet in a mile as 14A0 (base-16 for this example).
Your complaining about ratios used for unit conversion, not base numeral systems… Fuck, this feels like a slashdot comment.
You count up in incremental numbers until you reach 5280 and then finally increment from 0 to 1 miles. That’s base 5280. Just because we didnt invent more symbols to easily represent that does not mean its not a different numeric base.
And to remember the number of yards in a mile: 1 San Francisco
One-seven-six-oh
At first I thought that’s how Americans measure it - in San Franciscos. But given how “San Francisco” doesn’t sound like “One seven six oh” I’m not sure if they don’t.
It’s not a good tip, but this is how I hear it:
1: One
San Fran: Seven
Cisc: Six
O: Oh
I just came up with it off the cuff, but I may use it going forward. I’ve never been able to remember feet or yards in a mile.
Also, we only measure length in bananas and fractions thereof.
I just remember that a mile has 1000 strides in it.
Of course. I was trying to make something less useful than knowing the strides in a mile.
Take heart. You can easily remember that a stride is 5’ 3 9/25” because that’s the height of the typical Roman soldier after adjustment for 15th century English agricultural tax methodology.
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All units of measure are abstract.
I like metric because it’s structured around an abstract amount. Even something like Celsius is pretty abstract, because the freezing and boiling point of water changes depending on the atmospheric pressure. The measure of a second? Why is a second, 1 second long? Why is it 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day? There’s other stuff based on seconds too, like Hertz, which is literally “cycles per second”
I like to think about how abstract these things are, because if we were to ever try to communicate with a truly alien race, we couldn’t really use numbers, because their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different, possibly because they understand things we do not. We couldn’t even say to them to communicate on a specific frequency of EM, because that frequency is based on Hertz, which is based on seconds, which is based on ??? IDFK (neither would they). We base everything we know on the world around us, and that’s entirely unique to earth. We make so many assumptions about how things are because we’ve only ever experienced life on this planet.
The only thing that kind of makes sense is how many days of the year there are, because it’s based on solid science about our solar system. It’s still unique to earth, but at least it makes sense on a larger scale. Everything else? Who the hell knows. Why is a meter as long as it is? Who defined this? Why? What abstract Earth-based thing was this based on that other societies of individuals would have no point of reference to relate to?
It’s wild we’ve made it this far, to be honest.
Anyways, I kind of got sidetracked… I guess all I’m really trying to say is that metric makes more sense than whatever the USA is doing. Even if it’s just as abstract in its conception.
I’d assume that if we are ever communicating with aliens and trying to figure out each other’s way of expressing numbers and doing math, dimensionless constants like pi, Euler’s number (e), the fine structure constant, etc. will be important first steps. As you say, our units of measure are purely human inventions. But the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is the same no matter what units you use to make the measurement.
I like you.
These are all good points. Thank you.
…which is based on seconds, which is based on ??? IDFK (neither would they)
“The second, symbol s, is the SI unit of time. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.” https://www.bipm.org/en/si-base-units/second
I don’t think that was the idea when the second was created.
The solar rotation cycle is naturally divided into 365 rotations of Earth (give or take), each daily rotation was divided into 24 segments called hours, each hour was further divided into 60 units called minutes, and each minute was then further divided into 60 units which we call seconds.
In the modern era, we have refined how we measure a second by a very stable natural phenomenon, the emissions of cesium (which we also refer to as an “atomic” clock). But we got there first by dividing one of Earth’s rotations by 86400. It just so happens that 9 192 631 770 oscillations from cesium also equals 1/86400th of one rotation of Earth.
Additionally, neither a “second” nor even “one rotation of Earth” would have any meaning to someone who has never been to earth before.
It doesn’t matter how these units were originally defined. They have all been redefined as science progressed. As long as you relate the arbitrary unit to a constant it can be translated.
Except an alien species wouldn’t know what cesium is… We would need to represent it to them as it’s molecular makeup, which is the only absolute representation of it, and would they know what a proton/neutron/electron are? Would they have a deeper understanding of the physics, and thereby have a different understanding of what we consider to be quantum particles?
We only generalize protons, elections and neutrons because we don’t really know what those things are made up of. Maybe they do, so when we show them our representation of it, would it be too rudimentary for them to comprehend what we mean?
There’s still a lot we don’t know. And these are the kinds of questions that tickle my brain.
I think one useful comparison would be to convert their measurement of the speed of light to our measurement and vice versa. They will use different units of distance and time, but the values themselves will be proportional unless they live in a black hole.
That could work for velocities, but any measure of distance is based on our notion of time, like “light year” (the distance light can travel in one rotation of the Earth around the sun), which is relative.
Even an AU is the distance from Earth to our sun.
To be fair, we don’t really have another point of reference with which to measure stuff.
A good way to portray distance could be a blip the length of time it would take light to travel that far. Like an RF signal that lasts as long as it would take for light up travel from one edge of an object to the other edge of the object.
… It’s a difficult problem to try to solve even as a mental exercise.
their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different
The neat thing about math is it’s built upon universal truths that exist independently of how you describe them. 1+1=2 regardless of how you represent those numbers. Even among humans we have plenty of different ways of describing numbers.
Also, the best thing about science is that physics works the way it does regardless of how you describe it. An atom of hydrogen will always have the same spectral peaks, regardless of what units you describe those peaks in.
It’s these kinds of things we consider when trying to communicate with aliens. Take a look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
These messages will probably never be received, even if there is intelligent life out there. But if something intelligent does find these messages, they will probably determine they are artificial, and hopefully manage to decode some of it.
See, this is all fascinating for me. I love this stuff.
It’s also a good exercise in recognizing the assumptions we make every day. I’m trying to get to a point where I can articulate my thoughts and I don’t have to struggle through the curse of knowledge.
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
I remember reading this quote a few years ago (probably Reddit), but I don’t remember if attribution was given. Kudos to you CAVOK.
It might be funny if it were true, but it’s just a sad show of ignorance. It is exactly as possible in one as in the other for obvious reasons. It’s just not as easy to memorize.
To be specific:
- energy required to heat to boiling point 1180 kJ
- energy required to convert to vapor 8420 kJ
- energy required to heat to boiling point and convert to vapor 9600 kJ
Nobody said impossible, just that you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
Can’t we just agree that metric is superior?
But they are just as directly related.
Ok, so rewrite the statement using imperial instead. Let’s compare them.
I love this quote.
“High. You put the stove on high.”
Me watching a BBC TV show: “The suspect’s home is five miles away.”
shocked pikachu
there’s a very important video on the measurement rules in the UK, if you haven’t seen it: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNh9z3IzG8t/
If you want to convert between imperial units, going straight from feet to miles is impractical. You’d be better off knowing the chart of survey units, and they’re all small numbers so they’re easy to remember.
12 inches in a foot
3 feet in a yard
22 yards in a chain
10 chains in a furlong
8 furlongs in a mile
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
You monster.
The dark side can be a pathway to many abilities some might consider … stupid.
Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.
Did the metric system kill your family or something?
How do you do weight measurements? I noticed a lot of Americans use grams
Weight is in pounds. Only pounds. don’t ask me how much a gram or a ton is.
Volume, though, I still remember “Gallon Man” from 1st grade.
2 cups in a pint
2 pints in a quart
4 quarts in a gallon
What’s after gallons? not a clue.
We use both. Body weight is in pounds, but nutrition is in grams.
In general we use metric more for smaller, more precise weights and imperial for everything else. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone measure anything except cocaine in kilograms.
Drugs are done in grams i think, methric
Remembering 12, 3, 22, 10 and 8 does indeed sound way easier than remembering 1000.
I know right? it’s such an intuitive system with a convenient unit for every scale you might want to work with.
I genuinely can‘t tell if you are being serious. Could you tell me at face value, I just want to know.
yeah, it sucks. There’s no actual case for imperial over metric. it’s just what I’ve spent years getting used to and I’m not changing now.
The imperial units were created for practical every-day measuring, so if you know how to apply them, they still hold up to the task. Just more difficult to use for large data sets like architectural models etc.
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Than remembering 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10; because metric has more measurements most people don’t use as well!
- 10 millimetres to a centimetre
- 10 centimetres to a decimetre
- 10 decimetres to a metre
- 10 metres to a decametre
- 10 decametres to a hectometre
- 10 hectometres to a kilometre
I hate to point this out, and will likely be shunned for it - but it is base 12 and kinda easier.
Found the Summerian astronomer.
Metric will never recover from not being base-12. Ease of use and intuitiveness suddenly trumps “objective” design. We’d have metric time right now, smh.
If only they made a meter equal a yard. Then we could all be bilingual.
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We don’t count in base-12. Redesign the numerical system first and get it adopted world wide. I’ll wait.
Base 60 is five times better again
Let me tell you about base 5040
If there’s a better base than 10, it is a power of two.
Nah, highly composite number. A product of multiple primes. 10 is 2 and 5. A power of 2 is just multiple 2s. 12 gets you 2, 2, and 3. 60 adds a 5.
