Oh, really? You use your foot or your girlfriend’s? Because I wager those are somewhat different.
What body part is a quart based on? Because I don’t think it’s any of them, and you could probably still eyeball a quart of water. That’s to say, just shy of a litre.
How about one yard? Think you can do that? Great, just add a bit and you have a metre.
It’s crazy how Americans actually be complaining about how they’re unable to estimate or perceive things if they’re not actually measuring it against the bottom of their feet. Don’t you believe you have the ability to learn? I can see why you wouldn’t, but…
how are you attempting to disparage americans and talking like one at the same time. it’s just the name of a unit, who cares, a yard’s not the size of the boundary of their average house and barrels of oil don’t come in individual barrels
Because if I don’t assume their language, they won’t understand me, as my native language is Finnish. When talking to or about Americans, I might add a bit of American flare. It’s not grammatically correct, I know. Just double negatives.
Also criticism and disparagement are two different things.
It’s hard to realise the difference between what it’s origin is and definition. I think it’s wise to look into the definition of the foot instead of assuming you know.
Once finished, tell me why you still use the British unit?
Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.
From John Bazell “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.”
So you have it boil water by specifying the number of Joules to use? Or kilocalories?
What even is this line of reasoning? Outside of a lab, I don’t need to know the amount of energy used to boil water. That’s the point. It’s boiling when it boils.
And 100°C isn’t even the boiling point of water at altitude. It’s a totally arbitrary scale, not very useful in day-to-day situations.
‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’
This is a question I’ve never once heard asked outside of a chemistry lab. Which is where metric units are useful.
These supposed facts are also not true except with distilled water, at sea level, etc. etc. Water doesn’t freeze at 0°C, it requires activation energy. And any impurity will lower its freezing point. Plenty of ocean water at well below 0°C, as well as fresh water at very high pressures.
A bottle of wine is 750ml (or 75cl) and a pint (i.e. a normal glass) is 0.4731765L. Very intuitive.
What’s the efficiency of an ICE motor in metric? L/100 km? Great that it can be converted into other units, but it’s existence an admission that it’s not a useful human-centric measurement. Just like air temperature. When I switch my car to metric, the thermostat has to add a digit and increment in half degrees to give you what Fahrenheit gives you without a third digit. The external air temperature requires a sign in metric.
Also, which US state did Dr. Fahrenheit hail from? I’ll give you one guess.
But hey, decimalization is great, right? So why don’t you use metric time? Come on, throw away a lifetime of knowledge and compatibility with others because it can be converted easier in your head.
I mean, it is consistent, compared to itself. If I have a framed artwork held on the wall by two nails and want to raise it roughly an inch, my thumb is right there to measure with. No need to get a ruler.
The fact that there’s no easy conversion between my thumb and the speed of light in a vacuum just isn’t a problem I deal with on a daily basis.
You’re going “hmm, this is about and inch and I don’t need to be precise.” You know what the metric equivalent is? Going “hmm this is about 2.5cm and I don’t need to be precise”.
You can do the same with cm… but lets say you’ve got something a yard wide and need it in quarters, have fun. But hey if its a meter that’s 25cm. In fifths? 20cm. In tenths? 10cm. And decimals are super easy to deal with as well. It’s so much easier to deal with Metric for day to day calculations.
And yes, I’m American. There is absolutely no sane reason to keep Imperial measurements besides aversion to change. None.
So you think if I want to raise framed artwork by an approximate amount I would need a metric ruler? Why? I can use a thumb too, or literally any object.
So what if someone is standing back trying to communicate with you how much to raise it so it looks good?
“Raise it by the length of the last segment of your thumb!” You’ve just re-invented the inch. Congrats.
“Raise it by 2.54cm!” Wow, great units that are easy to eyeball without a ruler. Based on a subdivision of the great circle of the earth going through Paris (of all places). Definitiely not arbitrary and very useful in everyday situations.
Do you really need to know the number of inches from Los Angeles to Portland outside of a lab? Seems unlikely.
That’s the point. In a lab, where conversions and formulas are frequently used, metric makes sense. I use it all the time. Even the US military uses metric for their specifications.
My point is that the metric system is just as useful inside a lab as it is in the real world everyday scenarios. Why use two different systems, when one does the job and is generally a lot easier to work with?
Do you really think that measuring roughly (without a measurement tool) in inches is better than measuring roughly in centimeters or, meters vs. feet, etc? You learn to approximate in each system and make similar rough measurements, but when you need accuracy and actually do some number crunching, one system is superior.
And even in every day life, you often come across knowing you need e.g. 2.3 kilograms of something, but that something is sold in grams. I can instantly convert the numbers on the spot in the store without using a calculator.
I really cannot see a scenario where the imperial system is better.
Unless you give me a reason for converting miles to inches outside of a lab, you haven’t shown what you say you’ve shown.
I can demand you do a bunch of time conversions in your head and pretend your inability to do so means we should switch to metric time. But that would be silly.
I took an astronomy course in college (in America). Want to guess what system we used? It wasn’t inches.
Though even astronomy uses AU, which isn’t an even base-10 multiple of meters but a useful human-scale (or solar system-scale) measurement.
The inch is defined using metric units. 1 in is defined to be exactly 25.4mm. So per definition inch is based on the speed of light.
Nice that you have body parts which are roughly the size of an inch thoug
Who cares what the original reason for using that exact length is? What matters is the relation of that measurement compared to other measurements you want to use. Regardless of whether a length is in feet or meters, I’ll need a ruler to measure it - the thing that influences convenience is how easy it is for me to convert it to other useful measurements like kilometers, miles, centimeters, or inches.
…what? I’ve spent my whole life in the US, and I’ve literally never heard of anyone legitimately using their own foot as a legitimate measurement tool. Who the hell uses their own foot to measure a foot? You’d have to be crazy lucky to have a foot that measures exactly 12 inches, otherwise you’d be off every single time.
If you care so little about a measurement that you’d take that much variability, you might as well just take a wild guess. Unless you already know what your own foot size is in feet, at which point you could just as easily memorize your own foot size in meters.
And no, I can’t visualize a room in feet, I can take a wild guess and be wrong for any meaningful situation, or I can measure it, which I do with the miniature tape measure I have on my keychain for that exact scenario.
I don’t believe you. Any time you’re looking at an apartment or house and don’t have a floorplan or a 10’+ tape measure, you walk the length of each side of a room side heel-and-toe to get a rough idea. The deviation of the length of your foot from 12 inches isn’t material in this situation.
And if you’re really struggling with this, a room with a 10’ side would be about ten small steps across, a bit more than three strides.
I know intuitively how long my foot is and how long my stride is. I don’t know intuitively what the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.
Any time I’m looking at my house I’m either in a situation where someone’s just asking how big something is, at which point I say “I dunno, maybe 10 feet?” or, more likely, I need to actually know the size, so I say “lemme check!” and pull out my measuring tape. My desk is just barely smaller than the width of my room, and it’s too big lengthwise by about 2 inches. The reason I know that is because I didn’t rely on the general size of my own foot when I was deciding where to put my desk, and actually took legitimate measurements. Because it mattered. If it didn’t matter, I would’ve guessed.
It would take me longer to take 10 steps and calculate how far off my own foot is from a foot than it would be for me to just measure 10 feet, even if I already knew my own foot size off the top of my head, which I clearly don’t. The reason you know the length of your own stride and feet is because you use them for measurement; that’s very strange, but regardless, I can’t believe it would have been any more difficult for you to memorize the same measurements in another system.
Anything worth trying to measure is worth measuring accurately, and anything else isn’t worth measuring. I agree that making things easy to measure improves day-to-day interactions with the things around us, but that’s why I recommend getting a small tape measure you can carry everywhere, not just guessing by the approximate size of people’s body parts that grow to completely different sizes.
It’s not that bad once you accept that there is no correct answer for what should be considered “1 length” unless you want to use Planck units, which are absurdly uselessly large or small.
The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, setting 10000 km as that quarter of the Earth’s polar circumference.
There was the navigation rationale for setting the meter/metre at the length that it is, but the original and subsequent definitions proved to be inconsistent and difficult to measure precisely.
Remind me — what’s the definition of a meter?
The length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second.
Why?
Just trying to wrap my feeble American brain around these extremely intuitive measurements.
As opposed to the foot, a body part notorious for its consistency in size across all people /s
It’s good enough for an estimate of the size of a room, which is what it’s commonly used for.
Oh, really? You use your foot or your girlfriend’s? Because I wager those are somewhat different.
What body part is a quart based on? Because I don’t think it’s any of them, and you could probably still eyeball a quart of water. That’s to say, just shy of a litre.
How about one yard? Think you can do that? Great, just add a bit and you have a metre.
It’s crazy how Americans actually be complaining about how they’re unable to estimate or perceive things if they’re not actually measuring it against the bottom of their feet. Don’t you believe you have the ability to learn? I can see why you wouldn’t, but…
how are you attempting to disparage americans and talking like one at the same time. it’s just the name of a unit, who cares, a yard’s not the size of the boundary of their average house and barrels of oil don’t come in individual barrels
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Because if I don’t assume their language, they won’t understand me, as my native language is Finnish. When talking to or about Americans, I might add a bit of American flare. It’s not grammatically correct, I know. Just double negatives.
Also criticism and disparagement are two different things.
international outreach is very important work so i’ll leave you to your methods
The sheer ignorance in this comment really makes the condescension even funnier.
It’s hard to realise the difference between what it’s origin is and definition. I think it’s wise to look into the definition of the foot instead of assuming you know.
Once finished, tell me why you still use the British unit?
Half of yo mama’s waistline measurement.
Wikipedia says:
Of course. It’s so obvious.
No, but based on physical principals and highly reproducible. BTW, what’s the official definition of an inch?
Roughly the length of the last segment of my thumb. Which is roughly 1/12th the length of my foot. Which is roughly 1/3 of my stride.
Things I don’t need a vacuum and instruments that can measure the speed of light to reproduce.
A mole is a very useful unit of measurement in chemistry, but much less so in baking.
“Roughly” - yep, that’s the best way to measure everything. Especially in science and calculations.
Hey whats a space shuttle or two between friends
I conceded, in the post you responded to, that metric is better for science. It’s the last sentence in my post.
Do you struggle with reading comprehension?
Uhm… No, you did not.
Are you okay?
How many moles of flour are you putting into your bread dough?
From John Bazell “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.”
You guys must boil water differently than I do. I put water in a kettle on the stove on high and take it off when it boils.
Well yeah, stove kettles are a century out of date, for a start.
I presume you use an electric kettle, then?
So you have it boil water by specifying the number of Joules to use? Or kilocalories?
What even is this line of reasoning? Outside of a lab, I don’t need to know the amount of energy used to boil water. That’s the point. It’s boiling when it boils.
And 100°C isn’t even the boiling point of water at altitude. It’s a totally arbitrary scale, not very useful in day-to-day situations.
Read again. Slowly.
This is a question I’ve never once heard asked outside of a chemistry lab. Which is where metric units are useful.
These supposed facts are also not true except with distilled water, at sea level, etc. etc. Water doesn’t freeze at 0°C, it requires activation energy. And any impurity will lower its freezing point. Plenty of ocean water at well below 0°C, as well as fresh water at very high pressures.
A bottle of wine is 750ml (or 75cl) and a pint (i.e. a normal glass) is 0.4731765L. Very intuitive.
What’s the efficiency of an ICE motor in metric? L/100 km? Great that it can be converted into other units, but it’s existence an admission that it’s not a useful human-centric measurement. Just like air temperature. When I switch my car to metric, the thermostat has to add a digit and increment in half degrees to give you what Fahrenheit gives you without a third digit. The external air temperature requires a sign in metric.
Also, which US state did Dr. Fahrenheit hail from? I’ll give you one guess.
But hey, decimalization is great, right? So why don’t you use metric time? Come on, throw away a lifetime of knowledge and compatibility with others because it can be converted easier in your head.
Real consistent there, Cletus
I mean, it is consistent, compared to itself. If I have a framed artwork held on the wall by two nails and want to raise it roughly an inch, my thumb is right there to measure with. No need to get a ruler.
The fact that there’s no easy conversion between my thumb and the speed of light in a vacuum just isn’t a problem I deal with on a daily basis.
This a really stupid argument.
You’re going “hmm, this is about and inch and I don’t need to be precise.” You know what the metric equivalent is? Going “hmm this is about 2.5cm and I don’t need to be precise”.
Be better.
You can do the same with cm… but lets say you’ve got something a yard wide and need it in quarters, have fun. But hey if its a meter that’s 25cm. In fifths? 20cm. In tenths? 10cm. And decimals are super easy to deal with as well. It’s so much easier to deal with Metric for day to day calculations.
And yes, I’m American. There is absolutely no sane reason to keep Imperial measurements besides aversion to change. None.
So you think if I want to raise framed artwork by an approximate amount I would need a metric ruler? Why? I can use a thumb too, or literally any object.
So what if someone is standing back trying to communicate with you how much to raise it so it looks good?
“Raise it by the length of the last segment of your thumb!” You’ve just re-invented the inch. Congrats.
“Raise it by 2.54cm!” Wow, great units that are easy to eyeball without a ruler. Based on a subdivision of the great circle of the earth going through Paris (of all places). Definitiely not arbitrary and very useful in everyday situations.
It is WHAT? 🤣🤣🤣
Convert me 528 miles to inches without using a calculator. I doubt you can.
And all I need to convert 528 kilometres to centimetres is just add a bunch of zeroes.
Tell me how much 2.3 pints of water weigh without looking up or using a calculator.
I can tell you exactly how much 2.3 liters of water weigh without any aid.
Bonus, if I have a litre of water I can use it to accurately measure weight!
Do you really need to know the number of inches from Los Angeles to Portland outside of a lab? Seems unlikely.
That’s the point. In a lab, where conversions and formulas are frequently used, metric makes sense. I use it all the time. Even the US military uses metric for their specifications.
Outside the lab, it makes little sense.
My point is that the metric system is just as useful inside a lab as it is in the real world everyday scenarios. Why use two different systems, when one does the job and is generally a lot easier to work with?
Do you really think that measuring roughly (without a measurement tool) in inches is better than measuring roughly in centimeters or, meters vs. feet, etc? You learn to approximate in each system and make similar rough measurements, but when you need accuracy and actually do some number crunching, one system is superior.
And even in every day life, you often come across knowing you need e.g. 2.3 kilograms of something, but that something is sold in grams. I can instantly convert the numbers on the spot in the store without using a calculator.
I really cannot see a scenario where the imperial system is better.
Unless you give me a reason for converting miles to inches outside of a lab, you haven’t shown what you say you’ve shown.
I can demand you do a bunch of time conversions in your head and pretend your inability to do so means we should switch to metric time. But that would be silly.
I took an astronomy course in college (in America). Want to guess what system we used? It wasn’t inches.
Though even astronomy uses AU, which isn’t an even base-10 multiple of meters but a useful human-scale (or solar system-scale) measurement.
The inch is defined using metric units. 1 in is defined to be exactly 25.4mm. So per definition inch is based on the speed of light. Nice that you have body parts which are roughly the size of an inch thoug
It’s defined as 1/12 of a foot and your wife said my inch was the best she’d ever had.
Who cares what the original reason for using that exact length is? What matters is the relation of that measurement compared to other measurements you want to use. Regardless of whether a length is in feet or meters, I’ll need a ruler to measure it - the thing that influences convenience is how easy it is for me to convert it to other useful measurements like kilometers, miles, centimeters, or inches.
You don’t need a ruler to measure a foot. It’s right there in the name.
And if the variability of people’s feet is too much for a particular situation, then yeah, use metric.
But I can visualize a room’s dimension in feet. You may be able to visualize it given meters, but that’s come from experience, not intuition.
And if your argument boils down to “who cares about arbitrary scales” then you’re going to have to explain what’s wrong with adding decimals to miles.
…what? I’ve spent my whole life in the US, and I’ve literally never heard of anyone legitimately using their own foot as a legitimate measurement tool. Who the hell uses their own foot to measure a foot? You’d have to be crazy lucky to have a foot that measures exactly 12 inches, otherwise you’d be off every single time.
If you care so little about a measurement that you’d take that much variability, you might as well just take a wild guess. Unless you already know what your own foot size is in feet, at which point you could just as easily memorize your own foot size in meters.
And no, I can’t visualize a room in feet, I can take a wild guess and be wrong for any meaningful situation, or I can measure it, which I do with the miniature tape measure I have on my keychain for that exact scenario.
I don’t believe you. Any time you’re looking at an apartment or house and don’t have a floorplan or a 10’+ tape measure, you walk the length of each side of a room side heel-and-toe to get a rough idea. The deviation of the length of your foot from 12 inches isn’t material in this situation.
And if you’re really struggling with this, a room with a 10’ side would be about ten small steps across, a bit more than three strides.
I know intuitively how long my foot is and how long my stride is. I don’t know intuitively what the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.
Any time I’m looking at my house I’m either in a situation where someone’s just asking how big something is, at which point I say “I dunno, maybe 10 feet?” or, more likely, I need to actually know the size, so I say “lemme check!” and pull out my measuring tape. My desk is just barely smaller than the width of my room, and it’s too big lengthwise by about 2 inches. The reason I know that is because I didn’t rely on the general size of my own foot when I was deciding where to put my desk, and actually took legitimate measurements. Because it mattered. If it didn’t matter, I would’ve guessed.
It would take me longer to take 10 steps and calculate how far off my own foot is from a foot than it would be for me to just measure 10 feet, even if I already knew my own foot size off the top of my head, which I clearly don’t. The reason you know the length of your own stride and feet is because you use them for measurement; that’s very strange, but regardless, I can’t believe it would have been any more difficult for you to memorize the same measurements in another system.
Anything worth trying to measure is worth measuring accurately, and anything else isn’t worth measuring. I agree that making things easy to measure improves day-to-day interactions with the things around us, but that’s why I recommend getting a small tape measure you can carry everywhere, not just guessing by the approximate size of people’s body parts that grow to completely different sizes.
It’s not that bad once you accept that there is no correct answer for what should be considered “1 length” unless you want to use Planck units, which are absurdly uselessly large or small.
There was the navigation rationale for setting the meter/metre at the length that it is, but the original and subsequent definitions proved to be inconsistent and difficult to measure precisely.
It’s also not accurate because one of the people who measured that distance made a small mistake in their calculations.