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Trigger2_2000 ,

Uncle Sam couldn’t handle the success the metric system would bring. /s

baltakatei ,

Can’t wait for the day when Uncle Sam to turns brown.

jg1i ,

I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅

AgentOrangesicle ,
@AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world avatar

Lab rat here. I got you fam! Let’s collectively believe that BTU’s are real!

Wait…

Bgugi ,

Uuummm… Ackshually Americans don’t use imperial units, they use united States customary units. Which are similar, but just a smidge different.

jg1i ,

It’s possible! We can switch! I’m US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.

Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I’ve been shocked at how many people don’t realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using “Mexico units” once… Also, I’ve met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is… uh… interesting. The arguments y’all are having here are way more advanced than what I’ve run into.

For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that’s it. The weather says it’s 25c outside? Don’t convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Over time you’ll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.

Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…

HasturInYellow ,

It’s also helpful to remember that water boils at 100C and your body temp is about 36-37C. Helps me when I see the weather or something.

AgentOrangesicle ,
@AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world avatar

Room temp is ~21 degrees. That helped me a lot.

SaharaMaleikuhm ,

I wish

AgentOrangesicle ,
@AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world avatar

Someone needs a heat pump!

uis ,

36.6°C. 37°C is on edge of healthy.

creditCrazy ,
@creditCrazy@lemmy.world avatar

For me it was particularly easy as it’s only Chevy and Ford cars that still use the imperial system for nuts and bolts so I’ve been making use of the metric system for pretty much every car I’ve worked on and I never really understood ferinhight to start off with as I only really cared about is it going to snow temperature wise so why memorize a number for something your only going to check one time in the year now that I’ve gotten accustomed to Celsius I’m now paying attention to if it’s going to rain or not

bitchkat ,

We actually were transitioning to metric when Carter was president and making progress. We did a lot of dual markings like highway signs, weather reports, etc.

The we ejected Reagan. And metric is used for pop and drugs.

uis ,

Drug dealers just know what units system is superior

lightnegative ,

Oh is THAT why every American knows how big 9mm is

LarmyOfLone ,

Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…

Biunitated?

SwingingTheLamp ,

Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn’t the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).

DMBFFF ,
@DMBFFF@lemmy.world avatar

How many centimeters in a kilometer?

How many inches in a mile?

FlyingSquid OP ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

American answer: “Shut up, Euro-freak. I’m trying to watch Big Bang Theory reruns.”

misterundercoat ,

Nobody knows

Hugh_Jeggs ,

Strange how you can easily work out the former, but the latter could be anything from 28 to 56285794

🤔

gimsy ,

Km is 10^3^m cm is 10^-2^m so the difference is 10^5^ i.e. 100000 (one with 5 zeroes)

Or more intuitively one centi-meter is a 1/100 of a meter and Kilo-Meter is 1000 meter therefore 100*1000 100000

It is quite intuitive, once you start using it

What’s weird is why we don’t use Megameters and megagrams (i.e. one metric ton)

LarmyOfLone ,

How many liters is 1 square meter of 1mm thick steel?

I’m definitely on board for megameters. One AU is about 150 gigameters and 1 light year is about 9.5 terameter!

uis ,

1*10^-3 m^3 = 1 dm^3(AKA liter)

Fedizen ,

The medical system ended up using the metric system anyway

uis ,

America has medical system?

AntEater ,
@AntEater@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

It’s more a system of an abuse and profit than speficially “medical”. That anyone gets better is purely a marketing/sales feature.

uis ,

Ah, you mean private medicine. When people talk about some country’s healthcare, they talk about about what state provides for its citizens.

trolololol ,

Nope, that’s why they didn’t duck up with it

parapsyker ,

There are multiple copies of this posted in the cabinet shop where I work. In Canada.

abfarid , (edited )
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

What was the point of this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?

meliaesc ,

Relabeling is such a chore.

RedEyeFlightControl ,
@RedEyeFlightControl@lemmy.world avatar

Replacing all your tools and machines is super easy, though. /s

FWIW I only work in metric, Imperial is utter trash, tbh.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Well we already deal with a mixed system, so they could relabel where possible and just phase out any machines where not, and in the interim just hand out slide rules with conversions on them.

MilitantAtheist ,

Why don’t you want to measure things by parts of a twelfth of a Roman foot?

sparkle , (edited )

of an approximation of a derivative of the Roman foot in metric*

The Roman foot was between approximately 0.96 and 1.1 international feet (most commonly about 0.97 ft, except in modern Belgium where it was 1.091 ft/13.1 in, the size of Nero Claudius Drusus’ foot). After that, the foot in Britain was based off the North German foot (~13.2 in), but in the late 13th century it became more like 12 in (so around the same as the modern foot). Later the English foot was between 11.7 and 12.01 in, and the US foot was based on the English foot until the 19th century when they made the US Customary Units and defined the foot as exactly 1200/3937 meters. The British made the British Imperial system and a bit later defined the foot as 1200/3937.0113 meters. They didn’t switch to metric because they saw “French Revolutionary units” (metric) as “atheistic”. Later, we advanced our understanding of physics, and the British adopted a foot of 304.8 mm in 1930, and the Americans followed them in 1933, based on the new “industrial inch” from the now-unused 1927 light wave definition of the meter (which used the International Prototype, made of a standard bar). The modern foot is defined as exactly 0.3048 meters, by international agreement in 1959 between some English-speaking countries, after the newer Kypton standard definition of the meter (which is also now not used).

Now it’s based on the modern meter definition (distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second, which is defined based on the uperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of a caesium-133 atom being 9192631770 Hz)

Omgpwnies ,

The really neat thing about those changes to the meter is that it didn’t really change how long a meter was (-ish), it changed the precision of that definition, as well as the ability to reproduce an exact meter, reducing the need for a specific piece of material to define the meter (which changes length based on environment). Now, an exact standard meter can be reproduced independently in any lab with the proper equipment.

Bgugi ,

What’s especially wild is that the kilogram was still an artifact in 2019! Every single calibrated weight in the world, big and small… They all could be traced back to a single metal chunk in a french vault.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Capital owners that don’t want to retool for a bullshit reason like “common good”.

DragonTypeWyvern ,

It literally costs them more money to not use the global standards!

DogWater ,

In the long run, maybe. short term is all that matters. And short term it costs money

pachrist ,

Poster shows the metric system giving Uncle Sam giant balls of steel?

Imperial emasculates.

MewtwoLikesMemes ,
@MewtwoLikesMemes@lemmy.world avatar

Actually, I suspect those are balls of iron.

LordWiggle ,
@LordWiggle@lemmy.world avatar

What ‘has’ we done. Well, they didn’t go to school, that’s for sure. And clearly they didn’t send their kids to school either, as it’s a damn old poster and it’s been more then a hundred years while the US still uses imperial.

gregor ,

I think that’s “he”, not “we”

LordWiggle ,
@LordWiggle@lemmy.world avatar

Lol I’m stupid

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

There is literally a W right over that H to compare it to.

LordWiggle ,
@LordWiggle@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, I down voted my own comment.

vodka ,

Kudos for leaving it up.

TheTechnician27 ,
@TheTechnician27@lemmy.world avatar

Based as hell.

ramenshaman ,

How awful. Making someone divide things by 10 instead of 12, 16, or fucking 64.

the_crotch ,

10 can only be divided evenly by 2 and 5. 12 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, or 6. The Babylonians were right, base12 is superior to base10.

5714 ,

Mars Climate Orbiter.

the_crotch ,

How do you know they don’t use base12 on mars?

5714 ,

Well, someone did.

ramenshaman ,

“Hey could I borrow a drill bit?”

“Sure, what size?”

“Seventeen sixty-fourths”

“Fuck you”

Sorry man I think in 2024 you’re objectively wrong.

Thorry84 ,

Oh you don’t have a seventeen sixty-fourths? No problem, just give me a letter H sized drill bit, that’ll do fine.

roguetrick , (edited )

You’re pointing out the problem in base10 having too many fractions that don’t divide cleanly. This is why base10 is shit.

Low IQ Base10: 17/64 = 0.265625

Equivalent expression in Chad Base12: 15/54 = 0;323

ramenshaman ,

This post is about the metric system, not base 10 vs base 12. Metric is superior to imperial.

Also 15/54 is in no way more convenient than 17/64, I’m assuming you’re joking.

roguetrick , (edited )

It’s the same number in different bases and divides out to 3 dozets(I made this up) in base12 and 6 digits in base10. Our friend you replied to was pointing out that it was a mistake to adopt base10 measuring instead of throwing out base10 counting because base12 fractions divide more easily due to the increased factors. And he was right.

ramenshaman ,

Ok, I reread their comment and I see what you’re getting at. Base 12 would be better in many cases but I just don’t see anybody switching anytime soon. We would pretty much have to start over. If people had 12 fingers we probably would have started on base 12 to begin with.

roguetrick , (edited )

Cultures that used base 12 counted on their finger joints with their thumb. 12 for each hand. Many common folk did that since you could count much higher if you counted by the dozen using both hands. Go from counting to 10 to finger counting to 12 dozen or a gross(144 in base10). Since we still have the English words for base12, you can see how close we were to adopting it.

ramenshaman ,

I wasn’t aware there are any cultures that use base 12, neat.

Bertuccio ,

I mean… Western cultures? That’s why so many Western measuring systems are in base 12 and why we have special words for dozen and gross.

Base 10 being ubiquitous is fairly new and it replaced bases like 12 and 16 that were easier for people to track mentally.

EDIT: And that’s not to say non-Western cultures didn’t use 12 or 16. They’re super common all over.

ramenshaman ,

Well sure, by that logic you could say all cultures use base 12 because there’s 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, etc. but are there any cultures that use base 12 for pretty much everything?

Lucidlethargy ,

I mean, some people do have twelve fingers.

the_crotch ,

And the metric system would be better still if it was base12. It’s time for a replacement.

Preflight_Tomato ,

The world if metric began in base 12:

The world if metric began in base 12

uis ,

Let’s use BasePi then

Lucidlethargy ,

I’m enjoying you playing devil’s advocate here thoroughly.

Lemmy is so pigheaded sometimes with certain topics that all they see is one side of everything.

the_crotch ,

“hey can I borrow a drill bit?”

“Sure, what size?”

“0.33333333333333333333333333333333 centimeters”

ramenshaman ,

Metric drill bits are measured in mm and hardy anybody needs that much (0.33333… mm/cm) precision. I have a set of metric drill bits in 0.1mm increments and I personally might not ever need greater precision than that. Maybe in some lab environments they need greater precision but I imagine once you’re on that level it would be custom anyway.

the_crotch ,

0.33333… is what happens when you try to divide 10 by 3. This is because 10 is such a broken number that 1/3rd (a pretty common fraction) becomes an infinitely repeating decimal. In base12, 1/3rd is 4.0. Metric is broken by design because it’s based on base10. Lets take the lessons learned from the metric system and invent something new, something better, something base12.

ramenshaman ,

Yes, I learned about fractions and decimals in elementary school.

the_crotch ,

Then why are you simping for base10 when you know enough math to understand that base12 is superior

ramenshaman ,

Base 12 would be better in many cases but I just don’t see anybody switching anytime soon. We would pretty much have to start over.

  • me in another comment
FlorianSimon ,

Not 0.4?!

bufalo1973 ,
@bufalo1973@lemmy.ml avatar

And 12 doesn’t divide nicely by 5. So what?

the_crotch ,

How often in real life do you want a 5th of anything? Is it more often than a third or a quarter? I bet it’s not

bufalo1973 ,
@bufalo1973@lemmy.ml avatar

Now look at your money and repeat that.

tuhriel ,

That would be an argument…IF it would be consistently 16 between each unit

Il leave this one here to see if it’s 16 every time: youtu.be/r7x-RGfd0Yk

Spoiler: it’s not!

the_crotch , (edited )

I’m not defending the imperial system. I’m saying the metric system is also stupid and we should have gone with something base12 instead of base10. There’s nothing special or magical about the number 10, our numerical system is only base10 because we have 10 fingers. That’s not much better than a foot being based on the size of the kings boot.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Hexadecimal or bust

the_crotch ,

16 is only divisible by 2, 4, and 8. Base12 wins again.

RandomVideos ,

Base grahams number is superior

roguetrick ,

Exactly. What we did was backwards. We shouldn’t have changed our measurement system to base10, we should’ve changed our counting system to base12.

ivanafterall ,
@ivanafterall@lemmy.world avatar

You still can!

the_crotch ,

Stupid Achaemrnid Empire fucked us all

rbos ,
@rbos@lemmy.ca avatar

Should’ve. Didn’t. Oh well. Stuck with it.

rbos ,
@rbos@lemmy.ca avatar

In retrospect I definitely would have liked a duodecimal metric system, but we have what we have at this point. It’s good enough and a DAMN sight better than imperial.

AnarchoSnowPlow ,

Fuck that, we should be measuring everything in Stone.

I’ll take a seventh stone of chicken please.

And lengths in Royal cubits.

If we’re gonna go weird we need to go all the way.

FelixCress ,

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.”

Cort ,

I mean, 1btu is required per pound of water per degree Farenheit. About 8lbs/gal and raising it 142°f would mean 1136btus

finley ,

that’s a lot of words and numbers for, “go fuck yourself”

AntEater ,
@AntEater@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

So intuitive!

thebestaquaman ,

Just remember to keep track of which BTU you’re using

Cort ,

Lol also which gallon for that matter

bravesirrbn ,

But we’re supposed to use Joules, not calories

MewtwoLikesMemes ,
@MewtwoLikesMemes@lemmy.world avatar

I believe the calorie is a derived unit while the Joule is a base unit.

Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.

sparkle ,

The calorie used to be the base unit, until we released in the 19th century “wait, heat isn’t a gas” and threw out caloric theory, and made the joule. Now the calorie is defined as 4.184 joules.

MewtwoLikesMemes , (edited )
@MewtwoLikesMemes@lemmy.world avatar

Yes, you’re right.

There have been multiple iterations of the “metric system” since it’s introduction in 1792–1795, most notably the original 1795 draft variant, then the CGS (Centimeter-Gram-Second) version, then the MKS (meter-kilogram-second) variant, with the most recent incarnation being the International System of Units (SI).

That’s why there are plenty of metric units, but not all of them are SI units. :)

Edit: Changed “1892–1895” to “1792–1795”. Lol, whoops.

stoly ,

It’s demonstrative anyway

backgroundcow ,

… weighs one gram … An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.

Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say “An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it” (far less elegant) – but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.

repungnant_canary , (edited )

the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019

What? It was necessary due to our observations of the universe (on every scale), not some arbitrary “fuckup”

backgroundcow ,

Nope, this redefinition isn’t necessary, it is a choice SI made. Nothing would have broken by keeping an exact relationship between amount of substance and mass, it would just have retained the interpretation of Avogadro’s constant from before 2019 (experimentally determined vs a defined constant).

user134450 ,

centigrade

and he was doing so well until this abomination 😡

TheTechnician27 , (edited )
@TheTechnician27@lemmy.world avatar

There’s a popular argument against religion that essentially says that if any trace of a specific religion were wiped off the face of the Earth, it would never come back. As in there’d probably be something in its place, but there’d be no way that the specific beliefs practiced by that religion would ever return. Whereas if a piece of scientific knowledge were similarly wiped from human knowledge, it would eventually be rediscovered.

A similar argument can be made with the metric system: I think that if standardized measurement systems disappeared from the face of the Earth today, something extremely similar would eventually be invented and adopted. It’s just too internally consistent and human mental math too grounded in decimal for it not to be. You’d probably even end up with a prefix-based (probably even Greek) naming scheme.

Now consider USC: the units fail to fit together in basically any meaningful way. They try but fail to be base-2, so you can’t even come at it from the already-tenuous angle of base-2 being better than base-10 (e.g. volume skips what two quarts would be, weight is more like base-16 (???), and distance just does something so insane that probably 95% of American adults couldn’t tell you how many feet there are in a mile). There are dozens of completely arbitrary, unintuitive, antiquated-sounding names (e.g. “horsepower”). Although the bases for metric measurements are rather arbitrary, they are extraordinarily precise, so much so that USC bases its own measurements off of insane but precise multiples of metric units. That’s not to say that humans would jump straight to metric or anything, but moreso that whatever would fill USC’s role as an intermediary between nothing and the metric-like system would likey be unrecognizable from current USC.

metallic_z3r0 ,

I would agree with you that something similar to metric would eventually arise, but I would consider duodecimal to make more sense than decimal, as 12 is a superior highly composite number and the terminating representation is much shorter for more commonly used fractions (e.g. 1⁄4 would be represented as 0.3, 1⁄3 as 0.4, 1⁄2 as 0.6, etc). I would also argue that groupings in powers of 12² make more sense than 10³.

I would also argue that it would make more sense for measurements to be based on natural units (such as Planck length) for all the basic measurements (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela), such that the anthropic unit (the one you’d most commonly refer to without prefixes) would be some multiple of 12 away from the natural unit.

Omgpwnies ,

The “intuitiveness” of imperial measurements is that they’re sorta human-scaled, at least for human-sized measurements. An inch is about the same length as the tip of my thumb, a foot is about as big as my foot, a yard is a single pace if I stretch a bit, etc. which makes it easier for a person to picture it.

Once you get out of that scale it really starts to break down though.

TheTechnician27 , (edited )
@TheTechnician27@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, the thing is that I actually don’t terribly mind feet, cups, etc. as individual measurements. Taken alone, they feel intuitive. The first of two main issues is, as you mentioned, scale. And you could make the argument that you could just take the base units like feet, cups, etc. and decimalize them with prefixes. And that does alleviate a ton of problems with USC, but you also then run back into the issue of unit intercompatibility.

Metric units have quite an elegant and intuitive interplay that USC simply lacks. What’s a liter? Why it’s a cubic meter. But now if I try to relate USC volumes to cubic USC distance measures, things quickly fall apart. A gallon is 231 cubic inches exactly, which is a whole number, sure, but that’s terrible for intution and for scaling. What’s a kilogram? Why it’s the mass of a liter of water. If you try relating pounds to units of volume, you might settle on one pound per pint, but that isn’t true, as it’s actually 1.041 pounds. So while it works at that scale, it quickly begins to fall apart and becomes completely inintuitive.

So unfortunately, even if we introduced intra-unit scaling by choosing one base unit and scaling that, working with USC would still be a nightmare when trying to intuit between different units. And this is, of course, not including things like horsepower that may have been intuitive 150 years ago but now are almost exclusively used 1) at minimum in the hundreds and 2) by people who have literally no concept of how much a horse can turn a mill wheel.

cor315 ,

And it’s sucks if you want any kind of precision. What’s half of 15 5/8? Fuck it, I’ll just use centimeters.

termain ,

Or they answer in BTUs. But ask them which BTU they’re using, and they won’t know.

uis ,

Calorie? Are they part of metric system? Everyone uses Joule.

FelixCress ,

Calories are metric but not SI.

BastingChemina ,

Applied to a real situation I’ve been through :

  • my pool 4.5m wide, 9m long and 1.5m deep, the current level of salt is 2.5g/l and a bag of salt weight 20kg. How many bags of salt do I need to bring the level to 3g/l ?
  • OR: my pool 14’9" wide, 29’6" long and 5’ deep, the current level of salt is 2500ppm and a bag of salt weights 40lbs. How many bags of salt do I need to bring the level to 3000ppm ?

The answer to one is 1.5 bag, the answer to the other one is “fuck that, I’m getting 8 bags at the store and it should be good enough”

abbiistabbii ,
@abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The idea that a simpler system of weights and measures that operate in base-10 will somehow cripple America is somehow fucking hilarious.

probableprotogen ,

This is his punishment for war crimes.

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