I don’t know why the U.S. gets shit for using the system that our colonial overlords forced us to use in the first place.
The only reason we’re still using it today is inertia. If we gradually tried phasing it out we’d have a lot more people on board with officially switching over to it versus the “ripping the band-aid” method of doing it all at once and causing culture shock to a bunch of ignorant Americans who haven’t done math since 8th grade.
Because nuance is useless when Europeans need to feel superior to us burgerlanders tm
Yeah I get it we suck but can we focus on what we actually suck about than nitpicking for bonus points?
The SI system is also based on the length of body parts though
The second is the length of a single heartbeat. During one heartbeat, the heart muscle consumes 1 J of energy, which makes 1 J per second, roughly, which is 1 W.
Also the 1 m is the length of the spinal chord. Some might not get the significance of the spinal cord and that’s fine but it’s the central canal in the body so there’s that. Edit: yeah yeah i get it it’s not the “official origin”. However i remember reading a paper where they discussed that the meter should be the length of the spine, but they didn’t outright wanna say it, so they searched for a natural circumstances that just so happened to approximate that.
Also i believe that 1 kg is what you can comfortably carry. Or about the amount of food (cereals) that a worker gets paid for a day of field work. Compare to japanese Masu.
Yup blame America.
On the same page when will Africa stop letting people speak Dutch? Stupid Africa still using that useless language that they chose to accept.
Our official kilogram weight and meter stick got stolen by pirates, and Copenhagen hasn’t sent a replacement.
A defense of the imperial measurement system.
I will not be arguing that the imperial measurement system is better than metric, because it isn’t. metric is obviously better.
I stopped watching after this.
How many cubic inches are there in a gallon, without just looking it up?
Oh fuck I didn’t even get to volume mesurments, I knew the imperial system was fucked but until I actualy did some Wikipedia. Well my God what the fuck.
The video in question directly addresses that chart, correctly poining out that it’s quite misleading in the implication that the measurements on it are ever converted between in any context ever. But no, there is no context where someone converts between feet and miles, or uses sticks or hands or fingers or palms or chains or all those other units I promise you haven’t heard of. Imperial is bad, but it’s not that bad.
Similarly, it is completely irrelevant to know that a gallon is an integer number of cubic inches at all, that is a conversion that is simply never done.
Maybe this is the US’s plan all along… to tariff the metric system into submission.
Both the meter and the second were created from a step length, just like the mile.
Second is a measure of time. You think its “the time it take for one step”… ?
A day is divided into hours. An hour is divided into smaller pisces, minute pieces. (See how it works as an adjective and a noun?) Then that measure is divided a second time, into secunda pars minuta
That’s why they’re minutes and seconds.
Metres don’t exactly sound like step lengths either
The mètre was introduced – defined as one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris, assuming an Earth flattening of 1/334.
Ever wondered where those magic numbers on that definition come from?
But no, I misremembered it, the relation between the step and a second is a coincidence. It’s the size of the meter that was decided in function of time, in the division that best approximated a step.
I actually went through the entire pdf. Didn’t read all of it, but browsed through and read the parts I though relate to this.
I can’t find anything about the metre ever being from “natural measurements”. Only that the people looking to make the metre debated the subject. But the metre itself was always based on the size of the Earth. But yeah, it’s close to a yard and a yard is 3 feet.
Ofc originally all measurements somehow derive from our bodies, because that’s the first thing we measured with. But like the pdf quite quickly says:
It is universally accepted that the first important stage in the development of metro- logical concepts related to measures of length is the anthropomorphic one, in which the main units of measurement are the parts of the human body [3, 4]. As the sociologist and historian of metrology Witold Kula puts it, “man measures the world with him- self” [4] — a variation of Protagoras’ “man is the measure of all things”. It is a very ancient and primitive approach. Certainly, even the first people who adopted such units must have been aware that the length of their own feet or fingers was different from their neighbor’s ones. But initially such personal differences did not seem important, given the low degree of accuracy required in measurements in that social context. Later the anthropomorphic approach reached a first level of abstraction, charac- terized by “the shift from concrete representations to abstract ones, from ‘my or your finger’ to ‘finger in general’ ” 4 [4]. Nevertheless, even when the stage was reached of conceiving measurement units as abstract concepts, differences in establishing the value of these units remained, depending on region or time [6, 7, 8, 9]. Only in the eighteenth century, with the consolidation of the experimental method on one hand, and the drive towards international co-operation and trading on the other, 3All English quotes not referring to English bibliography are translation by the authors. 4The earliest measurement standard we have evidence of is the Egyptian cubit, the length of the forearm from elbow to fingers, realized around 2500 B.C. in a piece of marble of about 50 centimeters [5]. 2 strong emphasis was placed for the first time on the need for standardized units
] one would still have to include an heterogeneous element, time, or what is here the same thing, the intensity of the gravitational force at the Earth’s surface. Now, if it is possible to have a unit of length that does not depend on any other quantity, it seems natural to prefer it.27 [. . . ] Actually, it is much more natural to refer the distance between two places to a quarter of one of the terrestrial circles than to refer it to the length of the pendulum. [. . . ] The quarter of the Earth meridian would become then the real unit of length; and the ten million-th part of this length would be its practical unit. (Ref [2], pp. 4-5)
Ugh I’m not gonna format all that. I’m not like trying to say you’re wrong. I’m asking you what you’re trying to say?
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…
Americans actually be complaining
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Read again. Slowly.
Roughly the length of the last segment of my thumb
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.
it is consistent, compared to itself
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.
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.
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.
It’s also not accurate because one of the people who measured that distance made a small mistake in their calculations.
In an apocalypse, the Imperial system of measurement is easier to reestablish than the metric system though that should be used with an eye to switching to metric. The USA uses both and it would be nice if things (like soda) didn’t have to list two measurements or having to ask a doctor to convert from metric to Imperial.
In an apocalypse, the Imperial system of measurement is easier to reestablish than the metric system
How would you measure one feet more accurately than one meter without any measurement tool? You might say that you could, but how can you prove that your “feet” measurement is more accurate than my “meter” measurement? Or one kilo vs one pound? You couldn’t. You would have to start with a brand new system either way.
And establishing a “new metric” system would be much easier, because everything is pretty just multiples of 10.
It’s not meant to be real accurate. It’s meant to “do for now”. There’s a reason that the metric system took so long to come into existence. We have the advantage of hindsight. Any society starting over might not have access to that experience.
I prefer using bananas to feet though. Both are just as accurate measurement tools.
Metric would be easier to re-establish exactly because we have hindsight and prior knowledge of it. Everything is basically just multiples of 10, once you establish the base measurement.
The USA uses both and it would be nice if things (like soda) didn’t have to list two measurements
The solution is to fully switch to metric
I agree. My point was about if a population needed to do a measurement system from the ground up.
For scientific purposes, any system would be kinda hard to reestablish, without a definition that everyone agrees upon and a way to measure it accurately. The imperial system does not provide that definition at all.
For everyday purposes… what kind of apocalypse would result in the complete destruction of all of the world’s measuring tape?
what kind of apocalypse would result in the complete destruction of all of the world’s measuring tape?
The Empire Strikes Back apocalypse 🤣
For example, I can tell someone that the length between their knuckles of their index finger is about an inch or that a foot is literally based on the length of the human foot without having to have a ruler present. The metric system has no easy references. The history of the Imperial system is messy but it works (mostly) as a way to do rough measurements until the accuracy needed for the metric system is present. After that, the metric system makes conversions really easy, including getting rid of lot of units, and makes more sense.
Once you have the needed accuracy, the Imperial system is inferior to the metric system and should be phased out.
Feet length varies a lot.
You can approximately measure one meter using three feet and it will be just as accurate as measuring three feet due to a variety of feet sizes.
Yup. One would start with that and then (hopefully) agree on a standard that is hopefully metric.
Yup. One would start with that
One would start measuring one meter using three feet, you mean? Until we can establish an exact measurement of one meter?
Whose feet would you measure? They vary wildly between genders and races.
You would have to do the initial measurement first and then tell everyone that’s how long “1 length” is, whatever you call it feet or meters or bananas.
So why use feet, which are different in size between all people and no one can measure one foot more accurately than one meter without a measurement too? Using bananas is just as accurate as using feet.
So why not do it properly the first time?
