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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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