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Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

You are definitely (and thankfully) not the norm. Imperial units are awful. They're more ... human, maybe, in that a foot is about one human foot long, and that an inch is about one human thumb width, and how 0F feels "pretty cold" and 100F feels "pretty hot", and to me the charm of imperial units begins and ends right there.

Those are literally the only redeemable qualities about imperial units, and they have nothing at all to do with their utility as a tool for measurement.

I am glad that you like them. Use them all you like. I won't.

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>They're more ... human, maybe, in that a foot is about one human foot long, and that an inch is about one human thumb width, and how 0F feels "pretty cold" and 100F feels "pretty hot", and to me the charm of imperial units begins and ends right there.

As far as we know, humans are the only thing in the universe that care about any of this stuff. A computer couldn't care less if you are using 1 foot or 0.3048 meters.

Why not optimize for humans, the things actually using these things? Optimizing for the computer just seems...silly. It seems like something somebody from the 1970s would have thought was a futuristic idea.

Also, the statement that metric is more useful for measurement largely ignores the fact that Imperial has stuck around so long because of its usefulness in trade work.

It's definitely ONLY because of base12, but being base12 - imo - positions it far beyond metric for daily use. There's a reason why food items so commonly come by the dozen. Why would anyone prefer to build a house using a system that can't even accurately measure 1/3?

1/3 can easily be measured in metric... it's just not a whole number.

Far out I can invent a system that is unique to everything, and I can create my own abominable conversion ratios all I like. It doesn't make the system superior, it makes my system necessarily inferior.

My TV is now 12 Settos in size. My surround system consumes 12 audots of power. My fridge holds 12 cubic fudo of room.

There. Now everything is easily divisible by 12ths.

I won't even go into conversion factors on this insanity.

Metric is objectively the better system to anyone that doesn't have a decades-long familiarity with the stupidity that is the imperial system. That's coming from an american without a college education, by the way. I am the target demographic for the pro-imperial people. I wasn't abducted into any metric-only education system and forced to convert or fail and disappoint my family. I was a disappointment by my own hand, thank you very much.

I challenge you to make a 1/3 cut in meter length wood using a metric ruler. Must be accurate to 1/128 inch (0.2mm), the tolerance used in fine woodworking.

Not only is it trivial to just cut at 33.33 or what have you, your argument breaks down at cut it into 1/5s.

Good luck with imperial. And has to be accurate to .02mm. In metric? This is a no brainer

That doesn't really hurt the argument at all - you're just arguing about factors now, and if you're really going to go there, 12 wins due to having more factors. The mathematical correction you'll have to do to measure 1/5th will be displaced by all the correction you don't have to do for other cases.

You're bent on the whole number thing. Why?

Whole numbers don't make things easier to measure or cut or reason about. I can measure in thirds or fifths of a meter or a foot or an inch or any unit you want with a compass and a straight edge.

You're arguing that the mark on the tape measure is possible for imperial and impossible for metric, when thirds are involved. Not true.

Because infinite numbers are not a natural expression of discrete measurements, and when it comes to being price 1/3 = 4 is always going to be easier to put your finger on than 1/3 = 3.333.

I work in software and data analysis in the construction industry. A continuous measurement is good for some things, but it's definitely not good for discrete measurements. Furthermore, a lot of the people who work in the field for construction greatly prefer Imperial for a reason. They have no bias towards systems beyond what works fast and easy.

"price" is an autocorrection of "precise"

> and when it comes to being price 1/3 = 4 is always going to be easier to put your finger on than 1/3 = 3.333.

Am I missing something? Wouldn’t it just be putting your finger on the 10 cm mark? This is approx 4”.

I realize this is not exact conversion, but it’s trivial to come up with examples where metric is easier: say you have a piece of wood 7 7/8” long that you want to cut in half. Is it easier to put your finger on 3 15/16” or 10 cm?

What is stopping people from making meter sticks with 3000 lines, i.e. every third of a millimeter is marked?

(The point is, there is nothing any more "infinite" about the rational number 1/3 than 1/4, 1/5, 1/2 or what have you. It just can't be written in the arbitrary base 10 system, just like 1/5 can't be written in base 12)

There is nothing stopping you from writing 1/3 meter.

I work a lot with wood in the metric system and the third thing is bot a problem at all. I never had even remotly any trouble finding 333.33 mm or a 666.66 on a tape measure. For anything that needs extreme accurcay I’d go with my iron ruler with 0.1 mm ruling and beyond that I would go for a caliper.

If you consistently have to use a weird measurement over and over again, you usually end up making a temporary ruler (paper, wood, metal) anyways

The factor argument is not really something that stands up, because you need to consider factors for an arbitrary length of something in the world, not a well defined unit of your own making.

How about 1/3rd of a tree? It's likely to be in some ungodly fractional amount of an inch, that's extremely hard to convert into feet, but in metric the decimal system just makes it super easy.

Can I pick the blade thickness?

Sure, kerf is less important than the thickness of your pencil line in terms of accuracy

wasn't going to use a pencil

Place the center of your line at the correct location.

You're missing the point if you don't see the problem of an infinitely repeating measurement. That doesn't translate to a tangible action. You can't cut 1/3 of a meter, and there's no subunit to roll down to that can express the right number. It's not like Imperial system exists for uneducated people - it exists for trades people. Metric is the "simple" system, because it ties back to 10, a number we're all used to. I like the metric system for its scalability, but as somebody who works in a math-y area of computing, I have nothing but distaste for base10.

I can cut 1/3 of a meter just as accurately as you can cut 1/3 of a yard.

Not being a whole number does not make it harder to find where it is.

Ha! I'm happy for your apparent virtuosity, but the whole of America's construction industry is quite a few years into disagreeing with you.

So THAT'S why U.S., Liberian and Myanmar architecture is centuries ahead of the rest of the world.

By the way, why isn't your currency base 12? All the purported benefits that apply to length would certainly apply to money as well.

This is just silly. People in most of the world are able to build things just fine without using the American system of units.

Yeah just line it up with that non-existant mark on your measuring stick. Is it enough of a tolerance problem to really worry about? Likely not. But you still can't point to a specific line to measure too unless they have specially added 1/3 marks.

> you still can't point to a specific line to measure too unless they have specially added 1/3 marks.

You also can't point to a line to measure a quarter of an inch, unless they have specifically added 1/4 marks. What's your point?

I have a project where I need 3 wooden blocks, each perfect squares, to fit width wise in a 10” wide gap. I don’t want any space between these blocks sides of the gap they fit in. It’s an important project to me and I’m willing to pay a substantial sum of money.

But from what I am reading it sounds like you’re not able to do the job, the blocks need to be 3 1/3” wide each. It’s a no-go if I see someone try to cut them to 3 5/16”

What kind of system doesn’t let you cut such a fundamental length into thirds. Crazy.

I bet you that if I cut the blocks to 84.7 mm they would do just fine. If they don't, you take a file to one of them. And you have to do it like this with wood, anyway - because of imprecise saws, and moisture changes.

Yeah my point was every measurement system has some value you can’t easily divide into thirds. How you measure depends on your tolerances. I have no qualms using either system, but metric is a much better system in my opinion.

Counterpoint, the us already had undergone industrial revolution and had standardized size on inches. It would have been expensive to restandardize everything

I should add to the discussion somewhere that when I write code (or even do calculations) that deals with Imperial units, I just use the SI prefixes and end up with things like centifeet and kiloinches (miles are banished forever). It makes the code a lot easier and the people who are used to Imperial can tell what you're going on about.

Because adding 7/16ths of an inch to 7/8ths of a mile and getting an answer in inches isn't easy for a human. Adding 1cm to 982m and getting an answer in centimeters is dead easy for a human.

THAT'S why human intuition about measurement doesn't mean a damn thing.

Using metric means using the system optimized for humans. Period.

Your absolutism is a bit silly. I don't think the Imperial system is good for anything beyond construction or cooking, but there's a reason it excels those areas. And it's exactly because it's more usable by humans in certain contexts (like construction or cooking). 1/3 of a meter should not be an irrational number - how is that "optimized for humans"?

A scalable system that shares the divisibility of the foot would certainly trump both systems.

Nit: 1/3 of a meter is rational. You're looking for "whole number."

Correct - I've admittedly had a few beers.

Which might be obvious due to me debating the merits of the number 12 on the internet.

Well 12 is amazing, but arguably there are too many other negative aspects in the imperial system as a whole.

But 1/2 isn't a whole number either.

Base-10 absolutism rears its head again. The objection to 1/3 is that it has a non-terminating decimal expansion. This is not a problem if you're using base-anything-with-3-as-a-factor.

What about 1/5 instead? There's always going to be problems with some base, the point is that unit conversions are super easy with metric, and it's easier to teach to children.

As for temperature, 0 is really gold and 100 is really hot in pretty much every scale, that's just a very subjective way of describing things.

If you want to measure ⅓ metre, go ahead. Nothing stops you from doing that.

The usual convention in construction in Europe is multiples of 150mm, for example a typical large appliance is 595mm wide to fit a 600mm wide space.

The imperial system is not good for construction. Try measuring a 2x4 sometime.

It's just an established convention. And it sucks.

A 2x4 is cut to 2" by 4" wet and shrinks when it is dried. I'm no huge fan, but this is not an issue with the imperial system.

Uh, no. The final 2x4 product is milled mostly dry. Mills allow the timber to air dry, then mill, then post-kiln, and may mill the final product after that e.g. by cutting 2x4s out of a 12x4. The reduction of a 2x4 from 2x4" to 1.75x3.5" is done on purpose, because modern mills can put guarantees on the density of knots in the wood, thus requiring less wood for the same engineered strength guarantee. So the 2x4" product is not actually 2x4 because the mill is asserting that while there is less wood than just cutting a 2x4, the board they're selling is as strong as a 2x4 would have been at the turn of the 20th century, when they didn't have a way to guarantee the density of knots.

The imperial system is terrible for cooking, in my experience as a home cook and baker.

Measuring dry goods by volume instead of by weight? Good luck ever getting consistent results.

Base 10 math is the most intuitive for humans. Fractions are an abomination.

Math isn't intuitive for humans. It takes a lot of work to learn it and most people don't remember any of it past school age. If we taught base 12 instead of 10 it would be just as intuitive.

But we don't. The number system used in the western world is base 10. So why add base 12 on top of that?

It is appalling for cooking. Don't get me started on the shitshow of using "cups" to measure weight.

1/3 of a metre is 333mm, which is generally precise enough for construction.

How is the system good for cooking? Literally the first thing amazon echo was showcasing was unit conversions while cooking.

In what situation would you be adding 7/16ths of an inch to 7/8 of a mile? If you have such crazy tolerances you shouldn't be using fractions from the start. And even if you did, with imperial system you could just write '7/8 mile and 7/16th of an inch' or '7/8 mi. 7/16 " ' and when they measure it out they will measure 7/8 of a mile, then add on that 7/16 inch.

And whatever you are measuring that length with, fucking awesome job getting 1/16 or better tolerances over that amount of distance with .

Do people in metric-using countries commonly need to know what 982m + 1cm is? It never seems to come up here in the US...

Perhaps not, but nonetheless I instantly worked it out in my head without even trying.

These units are terrible for humans too.

Humans are good at base 10.

For this human, the relationships when (for instance) talking about water are great -

1g = 1ml = 1cm^3

Humans are naturally bad at base 10. This is noticeable when learning counting and arithmetic - children often skip 7 and jumble 6, 7, 8. Base-10 is not so bad once one has learned it, though.

Humans are really good at doubling and halving, which the Imperial system excels at.

That's false, the Imperial system is pretty bad at doubling or halving.

What's double of 3.7 feet? Or half of 1.5? What is 3.7 feet even? Is it 3 feet 7 inches or 3 feet plus 7th of a feet (This last question is a nitpick)

Any of these in metric are super simple, but just harder to do in base-12.

And I would add, it is not immediate to go from 200 inch to 18 feet 2 inches

In practice, as the previous poster pointed out, Imperial numbers are rational, not real. You wouldn’t normally experience ‘3.7’ feet.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not a proponent of the Imperial system (for instance, calculating prices for groceries is painful). I am just pointing out that the metric system doesn’t take into account many Human use cases (Base-10 isn’t great for Humans). It was a system forced upon people by an ‘ivory tower’, and consistent with US philosophy, it makes sense that they rejected it.

Americans are pretty awesome.

The imperial system is not even in a consistent base!

> They're more ... human, maybe

I think both systems of units typical cases are dominated by human factors. Anecdotally, humans tend to use one of three scales for their preferred choice of measurement and they tend to be smaller-than-human, human, larger-than-human.

For example, the km. I see mm, m and km used quite often.. but the other bases are almost never used. A prime case for this is "what is the distance to the sun?" If you're going to round your answer then the most concise form is 150 Gm, yet most people will still say something like "150 million km" which is unnecessarily long and non-canonical, but is much more familiar to the human mind and makes comparisons to everyday experiences much simpler.

You can see this factor occur with just about every other metric base unit, even though the conveniently prefixed part of the system would be "better" for all technical definitions. Just as easily you could use imperial units and just overlay the metric prefix and scaling rules on top of them and it would be no more or less accurate or better than the metric system of units.

> Use them all you like. I won't.

I use whatever is convenient or common for the application.. if it gets complicated or I need a conversion, I use a unit-system aware language or environment to do my calculations. It really obviates the importance of the choice of unit and allows you to think about the fundamental problem more clearly along with many other benefits including conversion of units at any stage of calculation.

Nitpick: centimeters are also used often.

> A prime case for this is "what is the distance to the sun?"

I was attending a kids planetarium show as a volunteer and the professor asked this question and a kid proudly shouted “1 AU!”

In Norway hectograms are frequently used. We use them for things like potato salad at the deli counter, pick'n mix candy, berries and small-time-dealer quantities of hash.

For mass, distance, area, and volume metric has an obvious advantage because for all of those we regularly deal with such a range of values that we want subunits, and basing those subunits on powers of 10 fits in much better with our number system and makes computation and conversion easier.

This lets one make a pretty good argument that metric has advantages sufficient to justify having to buy new rulers and scales.

For temperature, what is the justification for switching from F to C? We don't usually subdivide temperature units, so really all C does different from F is change the size of the degree and what physical process the scale is calibrated to.

One can argue that the physical processes chosen for C calibration are more convenient than those for F. C was 0 == water freezing, 100 == water boiling. F was 0 == temperature of a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride, 100 == body temperature of a healthy man.

But that could have been fixed without changing the scale at all. Just redefine F so that 32 == freezing of water, 212 == boiling of water. That would fix the one problem F had without requiring anyone to get a new thermometer.

> what is the justification for switching from F to C?

The rest of the world already using ℃. Imagine no more dual scale thermometers, no more switches in weather apps, etc :D

Sorry, I guess I was not clear. I didn't mean what would be the justification for switching from F to C now in the US.

I meant what was the justification for adopting C initially for the metric system instead of using F?

For other metric units, there were serious problems with the pre-metric units. For example, Wikipedia says that by the time of the French Revolution, the existing system had become impractical for trade.

It doesn't say why it had become impractical, but my guess would be it had a lot to do with no good standard values for the units. If the units are not well defined in a way that gives the same values everywhere, it makes long distance trade harder.

I base this guess on doing some research once to figure out why they did not defined the meter to make conversion to Imperial easier. Since they were free to define the meter any way they wanted, they could have made 1 meter == 1 yard, which would have made conversions of long distances easier. Or they could have defined the millimeter as 1/25th of an inch, which would have made conversions of short distances easier than the 1/25.4th of an inch that we ended up with.

As far as I was able to determine, this was never an option because, as far as I could find, there was no widespread agreed definition of inches, feet, yards, etc. All that was standard was the relationships among them (1 foot == 12 inches, 3 feet == 1 yard, and so on).

There probably was no way to fix that without adopting a completely new unit, because if they tried to just make a new standard for, say, the yard I'm sure it would have gotten bogged down in arguing over whose yard to base it on. The French would think everyone should adopt their yard, the English would think everyone should adopt theirs, and so on.

So, a new unit, based on something not tied to any one region or nation, makes sense.

Temperature did not suffer from this, or did not suffer from it in a way that was not easily fixable. F was based on a reproducible physical 0 point based on the temperature of a brine with a self-stabilizing temperature. The only problem F had was that there had been some waffling over the other calibration point, which had been fixed well before the first attempts at a metric system.

So...why did they pick C?

Imperial units are good for describing small items in 'feets' length, and for cooking measures.

I don't think miles have an advantage over kilometers.

In Canada, people have trouble understanding the various measures if '10ml' of this, or '10mg' of that.

They do understand 'a teaspoon' or a 'large spoon'.

I think we need some kind of colloquial measure for food.

Recipes in cups are one thing I cannot understand, I do have a scale, I can measure everything with that

"Recipes in cups are one thing I cannot understand"

You drink out of cups every day; this is what humans, even you understand.

'A scale' is inapplicable while you're buying food or reading labels.

Why use a scale when everyone knows what a cup and teaspoon are? They are human measurements.

But it doesn't matter what you use, what matters is what people understand, and they don't understand grams and millilitres.

It's been identified as a health problem: people don't have an intuition for the units on labels - there should be imperial units to help them understand.

As for litre/gallon or pound/kg I don't think it matters ... but consider for a moment that everyone in Canada that I know still uses pounds. And feet/inches for height.

I don't know a single person that can tell you their weight in Kg, maybe heir height in meters but they'd have to think about it.

My cupboard has cups in all kinds of sizes. Which one is the right one to use as a measurement? And for baking there's quite a big difference if my cups are 150 ml or 350 ml, especially when paired with counted ingredients like eggs. That's the problem with cups.

All of your regular coffee cups are exactly 250ml.

Regular people use them for basic baking all the time, like making pancakes.

'Cups' are still better measures than ml because even you, in your self-acclaimed ignorance have a sense of how much a cup is whereas people do not have any idea how much '300ml' is.

Canadians have no clue what 10ml of anything is.

Canadians will continue to use feet and pounds for personal measure, despite being surrounded by total metric system - that should tell you something.

Do you order beer in ml? Or pints?

Seriously, do you know anyone that orders a 473ml of beer?

So why pints? And not ml? Because it makes sense.

Everything should be in metric, but many things should also be Imperial because metric is not useful for many common measurements.

The entire construction industry in Canada still uses Imperial, and it also weirdly makes sense. Inches and feet are slightly more approachable at smaller scale.

How can you be sure that "all of your regular coffee cups are exactly 250ml"? And what about teaspoon? And everything else?

Everyone here is obviously biased toward his/her own measurement system based on our experience, but the fact that "3 cups and a half of milk" is more precise than "875mL of milk" is clearly false.

I didn't say anything about Imperial being more precise.

I'm saying it's often more useful.

1 cup mix, 1 cup milk + 1 egg.

1 pint of beer.

1 teaspoon of sugar.

These are things everyone can understand.

You can put the ml on the side of the label.

"That guy is 6 feet tall, about 180 lbs."

Is better than metric for most people.

"I'll have a glass of wine" instead of "I'll have 240 ml of wine"

Any one of you who orders beer by the 'ml' can keep arguing with me, but I suspect you all order 'pints' in which case you should consider for a moment why you do that.

> These are things everyone can understand

Eh, no, here in my country nobody uses that units, all the recipes and in the stores, the units are ml, kg, etc

> whereas people do not have any idea how much '300ml' is.

No, you get a sense of this if you live somewhere that uses ml for things.

One can of soda is 330 ml.

I live in Canada we use ml and nobody orders beer in ml.

5 grams of sugar? Nobody knows what that means.

They know what 5 tea-spoons is though.

I'll be $100 that if they put 'teaspoons of sugar' instead of grams, people would be shocked. There are videos showing how much sugar in a can of Coke, and it's largely because people are oblivious to the units on the label, which we can all technically read.

For 300 ml there are measuring cups that have a scale on the side. Same for 250 ml by the way. Incidentally, I wouldn't be sure I could actually measure 1⅕ cups of anything (under your assumption that a cup is exactly 250 ml (Do I fill them completely? One cm below the top? And while about 50 % of the cups here seem to roughly fit that size, the others are different.)).

I don't order beer at all, but around here it's usually ordered as 500 ml (a little further south, especially around October, they tend to order 1 liter).

And here I thought 1 Imperial cup was ~284 ml... 1 US cup is closer at 240 ml. Might get away with that discrepancy when cooking, but when baking, not so much.

Especially if you're using things like flour where you get different quantities which if you sift it, or spoon it into the cup, or scoop it from the bag.

Cups are fine for rough and ready, but terrible for baking.

What are the redeamable qualities of metric units?

It’s based on the decimal system, which we happen to use in our primary numerical system as well?

We use the decimal system for imperial units too. Thousands of an inch, millionths of an inch, etc.

In most practical applications that I've seen fractions of imperial measurements used, it tends to be in powers of 2, i.e., 3/16 inch, 1/4 mile, etc. Decimals can certainly be used, but for most applications where you'd use something like a "millionth of an inch," it's vastly more common to use metric.

What applications are you talking about? Just for a general example of the sort of thing I'm talking about: https://youtu.be/EWqThb9Z1jk?t=137

They're resurfacing a surface plate, which has to be very flat. If you listen to the exchanges between them, everything is being done in millionths of an inch.

In my experience (electronics manufacturing), both PCBs and machined parts are usually in mils or decimal inches, although millimeters are becoming more common and many drawings show both systems.

This might be specific to where you live though, in my experience in the electronics industry, I've pretty much only seen millimeters.

Or nothing is stopping you from using things like 1.3 inches, 2.7 miles, .6 gallons. I tend to use the fractions when doing measurements in my head. But if things get too complicated and I have a calculator I switch to decimal.

Frankly, while mathematically speaking 12 is a great base, people don't think in twelves - you can quickly perform arithmetic and our entire education system of math relies on base 10. Kind of hard to suddenly add two fingers to everyone. Additionally, base 12, would not act like 12 does in base 10, thus if base 12 is your key point of reference, a foot should be 10 in base 12 for inches.....

People don't really think in terms of 10s either - that's just societal conditioning based on the usage of fingers to count. If you can accurately picture 1/3 of set, but your number system cannot, it's not really that accommodating of a system.

By the way, you can count base12 on your hands using the digits of your fingers. We just teach kids to use fingers because it's the norm.

Why are you so obsessed with thirds? If you care about short, clean fractions on a human scale, base 6 is overall better, see this table: https://youtu.be/qID2B4MK7Y0?t=992

Plus you get all the convenience of having five digits on a hand and 5 as the highest counting digit, so you can count to 55 on two hands, and all the rest of the benefits in that (totally serious) video.

A numbering system based on human fingers would be base6.

You've got it backwards. Counting to ten on your fingers predates the concept of our modern positional number system by hundreds of thousands of years. That's why base 10 was already the well-established natural choice when that system was invented.

Thinking that you could represent the quantity IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII by the string "21" because it's 2 * 10 + 1, or similarly as "three fingers on left hand, three fingers on right hand" seems obvious to us now, but is actually pretty recent technology relative to the whole timescale of human development

I'm not sure what your point is. A numbering system based on five-fingered hands is still base6. It doesn't make mathematical sense to argue that we learn base10 today because our hands have 5 fingers. Even if you argue that we have 10 total fingers, that's base11. Does anybody advocate that? How did we come to such an arbitrary thing as base ten?

No, counting on the hands is not base anything, because positional number systems did not exist. Just like Roman numerals or tally marks aren't base anything.

People counted on fingers like with tally marks - they could express the numbers one through ten. Thus ten became an important and familiar number to humans. Thus it would have seemed natural to use a base 10 number system many millennia later.

Additionally, base 12, would not act like 12 does in base 10, thus if base 12 is your key point of reference, a foot should be 10 in base 12 for inches.....

I honestly cannot make any sense of this part of your argument. The symbols 10 would only look like ten they would still mean a dozen and the properties would remain the same. Furthermore people don’t think in twelves because we are not taught in a dozenal numbering system. And there is no need for twelve fingers it would be a simple thing to create two additional hand symbols to teach children to count to a dozen.

Twelve is a great base. I would prefer it but it isn’t the sort of thing that can be changed.

He is saying that you need twelve digits to actually use base 12 and that in every base N with N>1 you write N as 10 (eg in hex 10 is A and 16 is 10)

Understood, his mistake was this “base 12, would not act like 12 does in base 10". That statement is mistaken. A dozen would look like ‘10’ but it would still behave like a dozen.

Clearly, people do think in 12s, because it's been a common thread in mathematics and measurement and calendaring through many different cultures going back to the Sumerians.

Let me clear something: how do you count? Can you multiply 63895 by 12? By 6? By 3? By 10? This is an standard, there have been coltures where the base was 60 and they could multiply 63895 by 60 easily. But now the whole world counts in 10.

I would be happy if that number was 12 but the simple fact that we write in base ten makes it not the case (also mathematically speaking 12 is divided by a square which causes weird things)

There is nothing wrong with 12 but as long as you cannot do 63895*12 easily 10 is better

They're globally standard, decimal, and internally consistent. One never needs to wonder how many meters in a kilometer or how many grams in a kilogram. They have some human usable qualities as well; it's convenient that water freezes at 0°C and that a kilogram of water is also a liter.

a kilogram of water is also a liter

I have never, in around four decades of living, had an actual need to determine the mass of a given volume of water, or the volume of a given mass of water.

When cooking, I routinely need to split some quantity of an ingredient into thirds or quarters.

Yet I am also constantly told that I'm ignorant and backwards and irrational for preferring a system that optimizes for the latter, rather than for the former. Base 12 is genuinely better for many real-world applications than base 10, those applications are more common in the lives of non-scientists than the applications metric is optimized for, and I doubt you're going to be able to produce a rational argument otherwise.

So you never went hiking for a longer period of time or did anything that actually involves carrying water.

I remember when some guys thought about building a pool on the balcony, calculating how much water weighs is admitably not ver often used, but when it is the consistency of the metric system is nice.

I work with wood in mm for years and never had any problem with the metric system. Finding the third, fifth or sixth or whatnot is not hard if you are used to it at all. Converting from mm to meters isn’t hard, etc.

Having a number like 666.66 mm probably sounds scary to measure (beyond the religious connotations), but in fact it is a point on a line that is easy enough to find.

But that's because your recipes are built on the easy divisibility, no? If your recipes are built on weight measurements, suddenly "easy divisibility" brings nothing to the table. If you cook with a kitchen scale, "one ml of water is one gram" is used all the time.

> When cooking, I routinely need to split some quantity of an ingredient into thirds or quarters.

Why?

Recipe feeds six. Making it for two.

Recipe feeds five. Now what?

Never seen it. Have You?

Yes, but I live in a country which uses the metric system.

Makes sense. People respond to the systems they live with.

Are they globally “standard?” China uses Mou to measure land area. A pyeong is used in Korea for housing floor area, the British use pints in the pub and stone when weighing themselves. The US uses feet and pounds. We use clocks that have 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, weeks, months. If we want to be consistent, “minutes” should perhaps be 100 seconds, for instance. Horses are measured in “hands.”

“Global standard” isn’t necessarily an argument for “good.” Why aren’t imperial units the standard? Who actually decided that metric was the right answer?

And as a previous poster mentioned; why don’t we say a megameter or gigameter when talking about long distances? Because ultimately measurement units are really about human understanding, despite ostensibly being “scientific.” A foot as just as scientific as a meter. NASA went to the moon with imperial units and it worked out just fine. People and countries are entitled to their preferences. We don’t advocate English or Chinese to be the global standard language. Or that all countries use euros or dollars. Weights and measures can be perfectly accurate regardless of the units used; the idea that we should either create or adhere to a global standard is not unlike suggesting everyone speak the same language.

> the British use pints in the pub and stone when weighing themselves.

Using a country that excels in being contrary, to the point of being the national pastime, is a poor example.

Even then we literally use metric for everything else. And although it is referred to as a pint, it is measured in metric.

Weighing yourself in kilos is a more modern thing, but that is really the only thing.

There's a reason measurements have a global standard, NASA attempted to work with a team from elsewhere that used Metric, and this lead to the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter when they couldn't work well together and had a conversion problem.

Standards make it easy for people to work with each other across borders, and most of the world uses metric already. NASA has since then started all of their new projects on Metric too.

I do agree with your point about the fact that weights and measures can be accurate regardless of the units used, the argument against Imperial isn't about accuracy, it's about ease of conversion and changing bases of the unit scale. (Like 12 inches to a foot, but 3 feet to a yard etc)

> Who actually decided that metric was the right answer?

People who wanted actual definition of units.

Once upon a time if you wanted to sell stuff in my home City you would need to use the city measurements made via a really big stone tablet in the old roman center with various units of lengths.

This was hard to communicate and stuff.

The French decided that one unit of measurement was better than many and made one "easy" (possible) to replicate and validate when the imperial one still used medium sized wheat seeds as measure of pressure.

But now everything is ultimately standardized on the metric system (even the US).

So one need to ask better at what? Better to standardize? Metric no doubt. Better to use? Well this appears to be controversial

Global standard doesn't mean that every person everywhere uses metric. It means that people everywhere can use metric and they know what it means, and that official weights and measures are done in metric. Use whatever glass size you want at the bar, or measure your horses however you wish, but when you get on the road the signs are in km/h.

Plenty of people are "bilingual" with metric and local. Canadians are universally bilingual with metric and imperial. It's not that hard.

The metric prefixes we know and love are a huge plus. If you convert from Volt to kV or to mV, you just need to move your comma. Ah see what I did there? I uses a metric prefix on a unit that is also used in the US.

The thing is 1V is also 1Nm or 1J or 1Ws. So suddenly we have the meter there right besides the Newton. In fact if you look beyond "I build my own shed in the US"-scenarios, you will find the meter everywhere intertwined in the definition of other units. In fact the definition of imperial length units is based on the metric definition of the length light travels through vacuum in 1/299792458s. So the foundation of the meter is light speed, which helps with all kind of practical issues in physics.

The metric system has maximum compatibility to all these unit systems (except the °C which is a more-practical-for-every-day-use offset version of Kelvin).

Unit systems are always something you grow up with and are therefore an emotional topic. People will take fractions of inches as an example of how metric fractions fail to deliver, when in fact no european woodworker has even remotly a problem with doing their thing in mm. In front of me lies a ruler with a 0.1mm scale and a caliper with 0.01mm or 1/128In accuracyIf I really wanna be ±0.01mm accurate on a cut of 1/3m or 333.33mm getting that accuracy would not be easier in inches. My saw blade is precisely 2mm wide anyways..

V=J/C

V*C = J = Nm = Ws

Fractional units are extremely useful in construction and machining. Now you could use fractions with meters, but nobody does, and im not sure why other than 10 is a shitty starting point for fractions and you end up with crazy fucked denominators.

The typical woodworker knows by hard all “crazy fucked” denominators like 333.333 mm for a third, 200 mm for a fifth etc.

The idea that not having straight fractional values somehow makes it harder is just plainly false. When you tell anybody to cut a third of a meter they will just happily cut 333.33 mm down to their usual tolerance

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