It seems like a weird point to bring up. How often do y’all convert your measurements? It’s not even a daily thing. If I’m measuring something, I either do it in inches, or feet, rarely yards. I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this. When I have needed to, it’s usually converting down (I.e. 1/3 of a foot), which imperial does handle better in more cases.
Like. I don’t care if we switch, I do mostly use metric personally, it just seems like a weird point to be the most common pro-metric argument when it’s also the one I’m least convinced by due to how metric is based off of base 10 numbering, which has so many problems with it.
Edit: After reading/responding a lot in the comments, it does seem like there’s a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries. I can’t quite put my finger on how, but it seems the difference is bigger than 1 mile = 1.6km
They’re just annoyed that we use a different system with no upside when the rest of the world all chose to establish a consistent measurement system.
Which is fair enough. But now I’m annoyed that they keep complaining about it.
tbh… being in Canada sucks ass because of it.
here’s a fun flowchart for Canadians and living with both
and don’t get me started on date formatting…
wtf is 1/4/2026. is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
As always, the only correct date format is ISO 8601
WHOOOO ISO-8601 FAN CLUB!!!
[Cheers and goes running out the door]
HELL YEAH! This is honestly the worst part of my work. Half of the forms require YYYY-MM-DD, half do DD/MM/YYYY and having to switch is annoying, especially since personally I always use ISO-8601
Correct! And yet…
wtf is 2026/1/4? is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
Though to be fair the chances of ISO 8601 goes up when year comes first
I mean, if it’s normalized to ISO 8601, then you KNOW that’s January 4th even without dashes or slashes. (although preeeetty sure the standard would require zeros before the 1 and 4 in either case)
The date part of ISO 8601 doesn’t have slashes, it has dashes and requires double digits: 2026-01-04
The fucking date problem I can get behind with you.
I always use year/month/day now, which pisses off everyone but computers sort it properly every time.
Oof. A good while back, I worked in a US-based company with offices globally, and they upgraded to a global ERP system. At launch of the new system, documents (such as purchase orders) printed with dates in MM/DD/YYYY format. Thankfully, my suggestion to change that to DD Mmm YYYY (eg. 31 Jan 2026) was quickly implemented without any pushback, but it totally blows my mind that a company operating globally would default to such an ambiguous date format.
yyyy-mm-dd is superior it is unambiguous and sorts well.
They keep complaining about it because we keep using the worse system for no reason. /shrug
It’s a better system for me, because I already know it.
Metric is very easy to learn, so I’m not sure I’d go around flaunting that reason…
It is easy to learn how to convert between metric units. But that’s not what people mean when they talk about “learning metric”. They mean having an intuitive sense for how much, say, 100 meters or 100 milliliters is. Again, the emphasis on how easy it is to remember the conversion between meters and kilometers is extraneous.
Yea, that’s the really easy part. It just takes exposure on a level that’s more than twice a month and it’s practically by osmosis.
The conversions are the hard part.
500 meters = 0.5 kilometers 🤷♂️
And that’s how I know you’re an American!
Same reason the metric people keep telling me to change. Because if I did, it would be better for them. Difference is, I don’t drone on and on about how superior my forms of measurement are
Well that’s because it isn’t lol.
My guess is, if the USA method was better:
The USA would sanction countries until they adopted it. They would embed it in the national flag and insert it in the national anthem. They would make underwear out of it and put stickers on their 20yard-long cars.
I mean, it does have the noted benefit of down-converting between units being cleaner. 1/3 of a foot is 4 inches. 1/3 of a meter is 333.333…mm
I mean, you kind of cherry-picked there. A third of an inch is…?
1 barleycorn.
This is mental illness
Its all cherry picking.
Do people struggle that much more to divide dollars compared to feet?
I mean I totally get that base 12 is pretty cool for calculator-less maths (though not as cool for base 60) but ultimately, we still have a base 10 numbering system.
So yea, base 10 units for base 10 numbers. Using the same all the way down makes it easier to learn how to handle the more complicated divisions in all cases, you don’t have to switch logic if you see what I mean.
Of course, to each their own. The best case for metric remains that it’s the system everyone else has agreed on.
I mean, not really, it’s just the lack of factors that comes from having a base 10 numbering system, which is my the single big issue I personally have with metric. I still think it should be adopted, generally, because standards are good, and in the modern world it makes more sense. I just also think we should be doing base 12 instead of base 10 xD
It’s not my measurements I need to convert, it’s other people’s. Don’t forget, American content is pretty overrepresented on the internet, so I actually need to do conversions pretty regularly.
Beyond the day to day, a spacecraft has burned up in the Martian atmosphere and an aircraft has run out of fuel mid-flight because of unit conversions not being done. These happenings aren’t very common, but the repercussions can be pretty big when they do, and the fact that this is a completely self-inflicted problem just makes it worse. Also, the shipping industry spends a good amount of money on unit conversions.
As for the problems with base-10, certainly a system based on base-12 would in principle be better (mind you, imperial isn’t one either). The problem is our numerals are base-10 and so our intuitions around numbers are based on that. 12 can still be dealt with, but once you get to 144 or 1728, it gets a lot harder. I can certainly name more integer divisors of 100 and 1000 off the top of my head despite having fewer of them.
Oh, absolutely. And all of those are better arguments than “It’s easy to go from meters to km! Just shift a few decimals!” despite the latter being the more common argument I see.
And yeah, imperial isn’t base 12 either. I do think base 12 numbers would be better, and I would have exactly 0 reservations about metric if we did, though it’s not like I’m exactly anti-metric now. I use it probably about as much as I use imperial day-to-day
Well, I do think that has value too. This example is going to be fairly specific to my situation, but as a programmer working on simulation software, it’s not uncommon for me to see or need to enter values in terms of meters that I think of as being in the realm of kilometers. Being able to reason more intuitively about these distances just by moving the decimal point around instead of having to multiply/divide them by 5280 or something is helpful. And the reason I have this intuition to begin with is because I use the same units in everyday life. This does require the system of units to be based on multiples of 10, however.
That wasn’t because of unit conversions, that was a major failure of systems management.
I say this as someone in IT where we have multiple other involved people verifying work we do. Mistakes happen, so you have external validations. I’m not even permitted to touch the systems for which I’m responsible - I have to document changes, with extensive lab testing that is vetted by someone who’s never seen these systems.
NASA should be shamed for dropping the ball so badly.
Are those are the only two cases you can come up with, compared to the trillions it would take to convert, and the billions of errors that would occur with trying to convert now.
Just look at a single machine shop, that’s using lathes from 1945 (because that’s all they need for accuracy). Should they upgrade their lathes to new ones with metric indicators? How much steel is it going to take, coal, aluminum, energy just to transport the lathe to that one shop.
Then all their tools. The world doesn’t have the manufacturing capability just to make measurement tools for all the industries that would need it.
And then you’d still have the conversion problem between one business and the next during the decade’s long transition. How many conversion mistakes do you think would happen then?
You people who scream about this all the time have never had to even look at what it would take. You act like it’s a simple problem.
Edit: Are you even aware they never put units on the numbers they use? How fucking amateur is that? Just assuming the values are one system or another, when multiple vendors use different systems? Imagine Ford not indicating that engine block bolts are metric, or torque values are in ft/lbs vs in/lbs vs newtons.
No, there’s no fucking excuse - total amateur hour that wasted millions of dollars.
Metric is a relatively recent invention. Every single country has had to ditch their measuring equipment in order to convert to metric.
The reason it’s so expensive in the US is because they refused to change for so long. As the economy grows, the amount of equipment grows, so the more time you take to switch systems, the more expensive it will be.
If the US wanted to switch relatively painlessly, they’d just gradually make some measurements officially in metric. You can produce products labeled in metric with imperial tools. If those tools are precise enough, or the error margins big enough, you would not notice the difference between imperial tools and metric ones. In fact, there’s probably many tools out there that can produce in both systems.
It’s not a simple problem. But if it never starts to get solved, it will never be solved.
The main obstacle is not economic, it’s cultural. People in the US are used to using imperial, many only used metric at school. They advocate online that their system is better, and keep using it.
If USAians used metric in day-to-day life, they would prefer consuming products with metric info on them, so companies would produce more metric products, so they would have more incentives to adapt their tools to metric.
How do you change culture? Simple. The first step is to make something “official”. Making metric official and “deprecating” imperial would mean that communication with the government would be in metric. Laws would have metric measurements, technical documents provided by the government would have metric measurements.
If someone wanted to use imperial, they would have to constantly convert the numbers of the government, and you can’t ignore the government. So you either stubbornly convert each time, or you give up and start using metric yourselves.
Of course in the early stages, the government could provide imperial measurements too, as a sidenote, a footnote or an appendix. But the main content would be in metric.
But the US has decided it doesn’t want to do that. I don’t want to get too geopolitical, but that only works while the US is an economic superpower. We’ll see what happens once that is no longer the case.
In the meantime, all I can do from the outside is try to convince random people from the internet. If they don’t switch to metric, they might at least stop advocating for imperial, and that would be a win.
Testing and validation are very important, but they’re no replacement for structurally making mistakes as impossible as possible to make in the first place. In fact, that was the conclusion from the Gimli Glider incident, that using mixed units increases the likelihood of mistakes being made, and so they stopped doing that. It’s kind of absurd to acknowledge that people make mistakes and therefore their work needs to be validated, but when the people doing the validation also make mistakes, they get all of the blame even when the people who made the thing did things in a way that increased their chances of making mistakes when they could have chosen not to.
Also, that’s some contrived scenario you’re painting.You make it sound as though every machine shop in the US would have to replace all of their equipment. First of all, for anything computer-controlled the units are arbitrary and software-defined. But even for purely (electro-)mechanical machines, it’s not like those can’t be (and aren’t already) modded up the wazoo. Why replace the entire machine when you can just swap out some of the gears or even just the dial? If a machine has been around since 1945, they’ll have done things like that many times already.
Of course no transition is going to be instant or painless, but it’s better than keeping up this situation forever. I mentioned two incidents because they’re the most dramatic, but things like that happen every day and the cost of lesser incidents also builds up. Somehow, almost all of the rest of the world managed to go against centuries if not millennia of tradition and momentum and transition in a fairly short amount of time during a period when precision engineering was already a thing that happened at a large scale, but the US is special? Give me a break.
I think the best ‘conversion’ thing in metric is not the mm/cm/m/km type ones but the volumetric type ones: a cubic metre of water/ 1 tonne / 1000 litres
What’s the equivalent un US units? 1 cubic yard / 1684.8 pound / 807.8961039 qt / 25852.675325 oz ?
Even then I don’t find the weight particularly useful, because it only applies to liquids with the same density of water.
Also 1 gallon is 231 cubic inches. Idk why, but it is, and I’ve already looked into all of the weird imperial measurements previously xD
ok, so i have a liquid (honey) with density of about 1.4 g/ml that is 1.4 tonne for the m^3
You had the same density of ~11.5lb/gal what is the above calculation?
just look at all that maths https://measuringstuff.com/how-much-does-a-gallon-of-honey-weigh/
[edit, shit my spelling is bad this morning]
Most liquids are similar to water. I will fairly often see a liquid and can do a quick estimation of weight based on volume. 40L water canister? That’s about 40kg. It takes no effort to calculate.
Fair point, it is usually things like syrup that end up having a massively different weight
Water is the most abundant liquid on our planet. And most liquids we interact with have a density very similar to water.
What’s your argument? “Oh. The ratio of volume and mass units don’t work for all the densities? Then it’s useless.”. What benefit would any other ratio that is worth to give up the 1L=1Kg water ratio?
231=3 * 7 * 11, just in case you wanted to buy enough to give each of your three children 11 cubic inches of orange juice every day for a week.
Ahh, yes, the classic two and a half eggs of daily OJ
Yum.
Ooh what are the problems with base ten?
Dividing my thirds sucks.
Base 12 ftw
Hey! There’s nothing wrong with a little 3,333333333333333333333…∞
I’m pretty sure metric plywood is 120cm by 240cm. You can have twelves in your tens.
3 1/3.
You don’t have to use a decimal point…
BOOOR-IIING!
In order:
- Dividing by 3
- Dividing by 4
- Dividing by 6
- Dividing by 7
- Dividing by 8
- Dividing by 9
It’s really, really bad at handling dividing by anything but 1, 2, 5, or 10. Dividing by 3 is very frequently useful imo
That’s fair, I am pretty jealous of that 12 inches in a foot conversion. That a juicy one.
But then again, we rarely divide 1 or 10 of something. A third of a meter. 0.33333 meters? Wtf is that? Nah, just use centimeters instead. A third of a hundred. 33 cm! There we go. That’s the length of the rulers we had in school. I can even measure that shit using just my eyes.
Need even more precision? 333 millimetres, fuck it’s getting hot in here 🥵
I gotta chill out
If we need precision it’s 333.333 mm xD
Dude, we round that shit. But don’t worry, I got more precision that you can even fathom. Let’s go, 3333 μm… 33333nm… to the moon
Yes I’m high
Besides the popularity, decimal conversions are the only factor, really. Otherwise they’re both arbitrary.
it does seem like there’s a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries
I’d like to point out that it’s literally just Liberia, Myanmar and the US. I have no idea what the difference could be, since it’s a concept that predates any system of measure and is biologically hardwired into us.
I’d like to point out that it’s literally just Liberia, Myanmar and the US.
As other people have pointed out, the UK, and Canada also use Imperial, just not officially, and it’s in a lot of different contexts. Canada had 6’ signs in most shops at the start of COVID, while government buildings all had 2 meters, as an example.
I have no idea what the difference could be, since it’s a concept that predates any system of measure and is biologically hardwired into us.
Not totally sure, either, but it does seem like there is one. There’s the funny haha one of Americans thinking driving 200 miles (~300km) is a day trip, but that’s not what it’s been feeling like. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s like the whole thing where once you learn what eggshell looks like in comparison to off-white you will always see the difference, where before you really didn’t.
Canada uses imperial in certain contexts unofficially. Feet and inches for a person’s height, or a cut of wood. You won’t see miles or gallons anywhere, though. The UK is even weirder - they use “stone” for a person’s weight, which is a customary unit in no complete system of measurements.
From the wikipedia article:
The plural stone is often used when providing a weight (e.g. “this sack weighs 8 stone”).[34] A person’s weight is usually quoted in stone and pounds in English-speaking countries that use the avoirdupois system, with the exception of the United States and Canada, where it is usually quoted in pounds.
Which I checked for fun. I love how they say that like therr are more than 4 countries fitting that description. 2 of them use stone, 2 don’t, at least I think. Can’t find anything official on whether Liberia uses it or not, but I’ve heard UK people say it.
Just the fact that they say it like it’s not a 50/50 split xD
They’re just jealous we don’t have to use decimals on our thermostats
Really?! The comfort difference of 1°C sounds like a first world problem to me.
Imperial came about as a system of units by measuring “everyday” things, and it remains pretty good for that. When you step outside the everyday, then it absolutely sucks - science deals with a lot of things that are too small, and engineering deals with a lot of things that are too large.
When I used to work in the water industry, working out how much chlorine is required to dose a hundred million litres of water per day at 0.5 mg/l, and therefore when I’d have to place an order to refill our fifty tonne storage tank, is easy enough to do in my head. If we were working in imperial, I’d have converted it to metric first and then estimated it.
On the other hand, metric calculations for pressure suck. If I weight 160 lbs and my bike tires are at 80 psi, then I have about two square inches in contact with the ground. If my car weighs 2500 lbs and its tires are at 30 psi, then each tire has about 20 square inches in contact with the ground. If I wanted scientific accuracy, then sure, I’d do it in metric, but I’d check the end result in imperial.
There’s near enough five thousand feet in a mile - if you need more accuracy than what you can do in your head, do it in metric with a calculator.
Tbh I have never had to think about the pressure of my tires that way. I pump the bike tires until I feel they are hard enough, and cars come with stickers in it that display the recommended tire pressure for them. 0 calculations needed.
But if I had to calculate pressures:
The lb<->psi conversion only works on 1G environments.
Yes, most pressure calculations occur on 1G environments, but in that case 1kg=9.8N. which is basically 10N.
If my car has 3000kg of mass, it weighs 30kN. Now the math is just as easy as lb<->psi. With the bonus addition that I can easily differentiate “kg of mass” from “N of force” instead of “pounds of mass” from “pounds of force”.
I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this.
100% this. Look, imperial may be silly, but some of the arguments for changing to metric are also very silly. Things are usually at a mile scale or a foot scale, and I don’t really need to go between the two.
And sure, converting between different units is convenient in metric, but how often do you have to do that? So you can easily tell me how many liters of water would be needed to fill a giant, square kilometer fish tank, but who needs to do that? What grade school math problem are you living in?
I do stuff like this all the time. Like if i bought a pool i wanted to estimates how much water it needes to estimate all the follow up costs, if i am cooking something i often switch between kg and g, if am measuring things i switch between cm, m and mm depending on what i am currently measuring all the time. E.g. i needed a new working plate in my kitchen, i wanted it precut to fit exactly in after moving some cabinets while still aligning the sink. The whole space was measured in meters, but the individual cuts were all measured in milimeters. I was able to do all of that in 5 minutes with one piece of paper for sketching and my head. (And it fitted down to the milimeter in the end).
Or e.g. in my last appartment we had an weird electrical water heater that didn’t work that well. I was able to easily estimate the extra cost it procured by estimating water volume, temperature difference and electrical price, most annoying par was converting from joule to calories because it is not base 10. (would have taken >3years so not worth it for me)
There is one conversion that I use every now and then: liter to kilo: A liter of water weighs about a kilo.
Helpful to compare groceries when some products use weight and others volume. For example, I can buy 1kg buckets of yoghurt. I then know that those buckets hold about 1 liter. Handy when re-using the buckets.
For evidence of the mile scale vs foot scale bit:
We have 2 measurements between that we don’t really use anymore. Chains, and furlongs most notably (8 furlongs to a mile, 10 chains to a furlong, 100 links to a chain, 4 inches to a link). The middle distance is just yards now. 50 yards, etc.
Actually, because a chain is 66’, a link is 0.66’ or 7.92".
A furlong is then 660’, so 220 yards, which is 201.17m.
A mile, being 8 furlongs is then roughly 1.6km
Ahh, right, mixed up the measurement between hand and link. I was tired, and neither units get thought of much xD I also keep forgetting it’s one of the only units that isn’t a flat number.
Ah, that makes sense now! Or at least, as much sense as any of the rest of it!
If things are usually at a mile scale or a foot scale. Why do yards exist?
Yards are at foot scale, hence their use in football. /s
I just toss stuff in a calculator and use both when necessary.
I measure in grams for dry and ounces for wet ingredients when baking.
I’ll include Celsius and Fahrenheit in weather conversations.
Cm or inches depending on what suits the crafting project better. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I tend to use grams for everything in the kitchen, because ounces are usually too big for what I need. Admittedly that’s mostly “Making coffee,” but still the point stands xD
Because the ability to easily convert between meters and kilometers is the only intrinsic benefit that metric has over any other form of measurement.
Some say imperial has some other benefits, like being easy to do math in your head with… but I’m skeptical that this benefit is worth much either - if it even exists at all.
The real benefit to metric is that it is standard across the world. So what the “convert to metric crowd” really wants to say is “it is inconvenient for me to have to keep converting from your units to mine - change your units for my benefit!” But that would feel rather dickish, so they make up a story about how changing your units is really for your benefit.
Honestly, metric does have some benefits over imperial, it’s just I so often hear the one place it really doesn’t. It being a standard is useful! Rockets have exploded because of the US’s stuff being imperial, because they didn’t convert it to metric before sending it off. I don’t remember the exact story, admittedly
That probe died because of a lack of oversight. If they didn’t have a proper system verifications in place for something that obvious and simple, wtf else is NASA cowboyin’ up, Shuttle Solid Rocket Seals? Oh, yea, they did that one already. Or pure oxygen crew cabin and a door that takes minutes to open with no emergency release? Oh, yea, did that already.
If I pulled a boner like not having multiple external validations of some math I need to do, my team would laugh me out of the room when shit broke. I’d probably get a nickname for such an amateur thing.
Yeah, that was definitely a multi-leveled failure
Not only kilometers and meters. You can also convert easily the following units to meters: gigameter, megameter, hectometer, decameter, decimeter, centimeter, millimeter, micrometer, nanometer, picometer.
Additionally, you can easily convert these units to grams: gigagram, megagram, kilogram, hectogram, decagram, decigram, centigram, milligram, microgram, nanogram, picogram.
Additionally, you can easily convert these units to liters: gigaliter, megaliter, kiloliter, hectoliter, decaliter, deciliter, centiliter, milliliter, microliter, nanoliter, picoliter.
Additionally, you can easily convert these units to areas: gigaarea, megaarea, kiloarea, hectarea, decarea, deciarea, centiarea, milliarea, microarea, nanoarea, picoarea.
Additionally, you can easily convert these units to newtons: Giganewton, meganewton, kilonewton, hectonewton, decanewton, decinewton, centinewton, millinewton, micronewton, nanonewton, piconewton.
Additionally, you can easily convert these units to seconds: Gigasecond, Megasecond, kilosecond, hectosecond, decasecond, decisecond, centisecond, millisecond, microsecond, nanosecond, picosecond.
Additionally you can easily convert these units to hertz: gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz, hectohertz, decihertz, centihertz, millihertz, microhertz, nanohertz, picohertz.
Additionally you can easily convert these units to joules: gigajoule, megajoule, hectojoule, decajoule, decijoule, centijoile, millijoule, microjoule, nanojoule, picojoule.
Additionally, you can easily convert these units to watts: gigawatt, megawatt, hectowatt, decawath, deciwatt, centiwatt, milliwatt, microwatt, nanowatt, picowatt.
Note that those lists are incomplete. You can expand them by “inventing” new ones by adding other prefixed. Like I did because when writing all of those manually on my phone angered the autocorrect. There are also many other units.
And of course, the fun doesn’t end there. You can easily do the same for powers of those units. Like m2, m3, s-1.
And let’s not forget that you can also easily convert between those “base” units and “compound” ones:
(Kilo)gram meter to newton.
1/second to hertz.
square meter to area.
Cubic meter to liter.
(kilo)gram to liter (of water).
Joule second to watt.
If you want to convert 74962 feet to 95 yards or whatever, you do you. I’m going to keep using metric, because it’s not only better for me, but it’s also better for you.
It doesn’t matter if I tell you a distance in meters or kilometers, you only have to remember what that means in feet so you can convert it to whatever imperial distance you want. Just multiply/divide by 1000 afterwards by moving the decimal point. If 53 meters is 863 yards, 53 kilometers is 863000 yards.
However, it does matter what unit you choose to communicate with me. I know that 1 inch is about 25.4mm/2.5cm, but if I’m unlucky and you decide to say it in feet, I’m going to need to Google the conversion.
Read those last 2 paragraphs again, and tell me what is more “dickish” (to use the same word you used).
I’ve never used any of those conversions you listed in imperial units, so your point is irrelevant… which is my point. Americans learn metric in school, and American scientists and engineers almost universally work in metric, where conversion between units is regular and useful.
But it I am going for a hike, I will estimate distance in miles, if I am making a soup, I will measure my broth in cups, and if I am trying to lose weight, I will measure my weight in pounds. These uses continue because there is no reason not to continue using them - they work for their intended purpose, in their intended context.
It doesn’t matter if I tell you a distance in meters or kilometers, you only have to remember what that means in feet so you can convert it to whatever imperial distance you want. Just multiply/divide by 1000 afterwards by moving the decimal point. If 53 meters is 863 yards, 53 kilometers is 863000 yards.
However, it does matter what unit you choose to communicate with me. I know that 1 inch is about 25.4mm/2.5cm, but if I’m unlucky and you decide to say it in feet, I’m going to need to Google the conversion.
There is no dickishness involved on either side in your example, as both people are expressing the measure (presumably) in whatever units they know best. This is no different than two people who speak different languages working together to communicate. No one is being a dick, it is just two people who know two different things, working together towards a common goal of mutual understanding.
What is dickish is telling someone that they should communicate in a different way for your benefit. If, for example, someone started commenting in this thread in spanish or german, I wouldn’t get pissed off about it. I wouldn’t tell them to learn English, or tell them they are stupid for not knowing English, or tell them that their language is dumb and tout the obvious benefits of English due to its lack of confusing conjugations. I would just either translate their comment if I was interested in what they are saying, or shrug and move on without caring.
As I said. You can use whatever units you want for yourself. I don’t care about that.
The problem is when we are communicating with each other. When communicating, it’s more than one party involved. And our goal should be to communicate clearly and easily so both the talker and the listener have an easy time transferring information.
This is not like language. Conversion between one unit and another is as simple as a multiplication. We can both speak in imperial and metric if we have a conversion table and a calculator.
Now, let’s say you communicate in imperial. And I communicate in metric. We are allowed to have a conversion table and a calculator. Here is my cheatsheet:
Inch = 2.5cm Foot = 12inch Yard = 3 feet Mile = 1760 yards Fl oz = 28ml Gallon = 4.5l Oz = 28g Pound = 16 oz Stone = 14 lb Ton = 2240 lbHere is yours:
cm = 1/2.5 inch ml = 1/28 fl oz g = 1/28 oz metric ton = 1000kg k (kilo) = 1000 d (deci) = 1/10 c (centi) = 1/100 m (milli) = 1/1000I only included the most common usages. The full cheatsheets are much larger but I believe we can agree this is a fair representation of common usage.
Your cheatsheet contains 8 entries. Meanwhile mine contains 10. Therefore, metric is objectively easier to convert in a ratio of 8/10. Furthermore, subjectively, the case is worse. Since metric ton, kilo, deci, centi and milli have an obvious pattern that is easy to remember and use. Meanwhile the only subjective “advantage” of imperial is that fl oz and oz is the same, but that goes both ways, since g is also the same as ml, so it would be 7/9, which is better for metric than 8/10. So i don’t think there’s any subjective advantage for imperial.
So yes, using a less efficient method of communication because “I’m more used to it” is dickish. Especially if the entire rest of the world uses the more efficient one. Especially if you already know the more efficient method. As you said, it is taught in American schools.
Do you know what is even more dickish? Defending its usage for communication.
If we go back to the language analogy: If 95% percent of the world understands only English, and English is objectively easier than Spanish and you also speak English, and you approach someone in spanish, and you keep speaking Spanish even though they are speaking in English, you are a dick.
Of course this analogy is not perfect. Since English is not objectively easier than Spanish (in fact, I subjectively believe Spanish is easier).
see my post[s] above
How much does 1 cubic yard of honey weigh is it’s density is 11.5lb/gal. In metric it ia 1.4 tonne to the m^3 even if I only know the weight of 1 L of honey.
Fuck trying to do that i US or imperial units
I will switch to metric for all my daily needs as soon as I find a cubic yard of honey I need to know the weight of
As someone who draws a lot of the things I make, I enjoy using Imperial.
It offers more immediate options. When sizing things I can easily change the size by 1/32nds", 1/16ths", 1/8ths", 1/4ths" or 1/2". It’s more intuitive for me.
Yeah, for small things metric’s actually great. I tend to use it to make my coffee
I daily switch from cm to meters
You wouldn’t believe how often I have to convert measurements because one big backwards country still clings to nonsensical imperial units.
And it’s not only length, it’s even worse in the kitchen where they seem to measure about everything in cups. Like “add one cup of spinach”.
I keep my own recipe binder and put everything in grams but I still use cups or quarts for liquid when it’s like half a cup or more instead of milliliters and liters mostly because it’s more intuitive for me to estimate accurately, likely due to indoctrination. I also use teaspoons and fractions of that, sometimes tablespoons but usually by weight at that amount. I use teaspoons and the fractions because my scale is fairly useless at that small of an amount, especially when I’m combining multiple seasonings into a dish to use while I’m cooking.
Anyway, yeah it takes me some time to create the recipe but I self host mealie and work from home so I’ll just work on them when I have some downtime. But yeah, recipes used to really annoy the shit out of me. I enjoy cooking so much more now that I have my own recipes, I think later this year/next year I’m going to see if I can get a custom book printed that I can give to my kids and loved ones as a Christmas gift.
I use metric for distance. It’s more functional and easier to use.
Meter. Cm. Mm. (But not km that much.)
