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Comment by shuntress | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call imperial measures "broken".

I typically prefer imperial measures in simple projects because they tend do feel more practical.

In things like woodwork, carpentry, papercraft, etc and inch, a foot, or a quarter inch tend to "fit" very well and are easily divided.

Specifically with papercraft, I prefer working in inches over centimeters because inch, half inch, and quarter inch all essentially function as "full" units and are very easily divided/combined and tend to "fit" better with most projects. A half.inch tends to usually feel like a good margin. A few inches tends to work well for a card. A quarter inch generally seems right for a small spacing. That is significantly more useful to me than base-10 conversions because (for example) 1 inch and 1 half inch feels easier to keep in mind than 1 centimeter and 5 millimeters (or 1 centimeter and 1.5 centimeters).

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Traditional unit in metric crafts is cm and the smallest traditional distance is 0.5 cm (pronounced "half" not "O point 5"). Notebook grid is 0.5 cm for example and you write and draw everything at shool on that grid so you get used to it (and get intuitive feel for how long a cm (2 grids) is in the process).

The dimensions you're mostly using are 0.5 cm, 1 cm, 1.5 cm, 2 cm, 2.5 cm, 5 cm, 10 cm.

> A quarter inch generally seems right for a small spacing.

A quarter inch is 6.35 mm compared to 5 mm (0.5 cm) which is basically the same for estetic purposes, any preference will be caused by familiarity more than any objective criteria.

> 1 inch and 1 half inch feels easier to keep in mind than 1 centimeter and 5 millimeters

Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall".

There's even a word in my language "półtora" which means "one and a half", so 1.5 cm is just "półtora centymetra". But even with languages without this word people think "one and a half cm" not "one cm and five mm". You almost never mix units in metric in the same expression, it just makes everything difficult for no reason.

I think Americans don't understand that decimals are second nature to people using metric. When you write 1/2 we write 0.5 but we think the same - "half".

>Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall".

one-eighty is quite common. That might depend on the country and language.

I guess. "One" is shorter than "hundred" in English while it's the other way in Polish (jeden vs sto).

I was very surprised that English people say "fifteen hundred" for 1500, I never thought about that number this way before, it was always "tysiąc pięćset" (one thousand five hundred).

Most English speakers say the year is "fifteen hundred", but it's mostly American people who say "fifteen hundred" in other cases.

en-GB: Today is the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty. The USA has reported an additional one thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Covid-nineteen cases. I would normally leave work around five-thirty, since I can catch the seventeen forty-five train home and watch the end of the six o'clock news. If I miss the train, I might take the two thirty bus instead [i.e. bus 230], or else the one three five.

But that's just a way of pronouncing large numbers; that's still saying '180 centimetres', not '1 [metre and] 80 centimetres'.

Are you sure? Intuitively I would have said, that "I'm one eighty tall" is an abbreviation for "I'm one [meter] [and] 80 [centimeter] tall".

Thinking about it, if I measure something with a folding ruler, I would more naturally say "it's one meter eighty long" (German native speaker here, as already said elsewhere, with other languages YMMV).

But the point still stands. In metric, you can slap the numbers together or separate them, convert them to different units or sprinkle easily units in between or not. It all works. At worst it is just moving the decimal point around or adding/removing zeros. Very easily done in your head.

In German would you say "I'm one four and 80" for 184cm? Cause that's confusing :)

Not confusing to a native speaker :-)

But yes, that's exactly how you would say it in German. There might be some part of the brain reserved to parse that sentence as "I'm (one) (four and 80)" but this doesn't feel weird or confusing at all.

Telephone numbers on the other hand are more confusing. Luckily you don't need to say them out loud anymore these days.

I’d say “one eighty-four” but of course the problem is that in german we mix up the order of the tens and ones.

And in fact so does English — it’s twenty-four but fif-teen (five ten, not ten five). In german we do that until 99 (nine and ninety).

Interestingly, even in English it was common to say things like "five-and-twenty"; it's considered archaic now.

Such as in the nursery rhyme you've now put in my head!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence

Well I suppose the nice thing about metric is that it doesn't matter!

You may be convincing me though, since in feet and inches it does matter, and it would mean as you say - 'looks about 10 11' means 10'11", not 1011".

In the UK though we generally don't mix metres and centimetres - '1 8' would mean '1.8' not '1.08', though I'd say the decimal point would rarely be elided, so that's clear.

So I just wouldn't say 1 80 about metres unless the question was 'how many metres' - and then I'd mean 180m.

French people would most commonly say « un mètre quatre-vingt » meaning one meter eighty, centimeters being implied at the end.

this is common in dutch aswell, especially when talking about one's length. "Een meter tachtig" (one meter eighty)

This seems very similar to monetary amounts in at least (most of?) the US and the UK.

"One dollar/pound twenty," etc.

If we're talking about what's common in English, I think it's a little odd to discuss European metric habits in the context of the English language.

While English is a "lingua franca" in Western countries, the two main native-English-speaking countries in Europe are very recent metric adoptees.

Ireland didn't finish adopting the metric system until 2005, so still use imperial units for many colloquial uses; e.g. human height & weight.

The U.K. is further behind, and if you couple that with the nationalistic associations the imperial system will have there, colloquial uses are even more widespread.

I think metric use in English is only going to become more natural and fluent with generational use.

Malta should be included too; They used to be part of the UK till 1964, they still drive on the left side, so no idea how they feel/speak about metric.

Yeah. I prefixed my country listing with "the two main" as I know Malta is also another but I know much much less about habits & metrication there.

It looks to be quite complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement

Also, I think English, while an official language of Malta, is much less dominant than it would be in Ireland (or the UK).

It's been 2 decades since my visit there (totally loved it). English was spoken everywhere, even though Maltese was common as well.

I find the European 0.5 mm block is very small and cramped - I'm pretty in sure in Australia it's 0.8 mm by standard. Probably my small letters are almost 0.5 mm tall so I don't really know how to fit into 0.5 mm.

Whether this destroys your argument or not, I don't know. I don't think preferred measures really depend on this sort of thing.

Are you using cursive? Cause I've seen some English people use capitalics in handwriting and then it would be hard for sure.

I find 0.5cm grid perfectly fine for writing, prefer it to the 0.9cm line notebooks (we have them too - for "soft" subjects like language learning where you don't need to graph anything).

https://kamionkawielka.szkola.pl/files/zadanie%202%2024.03.j...

(The size of the block is 5 mm or 0.5 cm, not 0.5 mm; I'm sure you know that and it was just a typing error)

You're not supposed to cram your letters into that 5 mm space: you generally use two lines, which gives you a 1 cm lineheight.

That being said, I don't like that raster size for writing. They're nice for drawing schematics and stuff, but for writing I very much prefer a grid of 4mm × 8mm (like this: https://www.dbs.be/images/vergroot/2518_2.jpg).

In French, you'd say "je fais 1 mètre 80" (literally "I'm 1 meter 80") and write it 1m80. Saying "180 centimètres" would be weird in a casual conversation, but fine in a professionnal setting. For a weight of 1500g, you'd usually say "1 kilo 5", maybe "1 kilo 500", but rarely "1 kilo 500 grammes".

So yeah, decimals are so used that you don't even need to tell the unit, it's implicit. I once had an american argue with me about Fahrenheit vs Celsius, because "Fahrenheit is more precise". I guess he was either a superhuman who can feel the difference between 20°C and 21°C, or someone who never heard about decimals.

In Polish it's common to use "deko" (ang. deca) especially for weight of groceries. So it's perfectly normal to buy "20 deko sera" instead of "200 gram sera" (both means 200g of cheese)

Wait i do say “one meter and eighty centimeters”!

> I typically prefer imperial measures in simple projects because they tend do feel more practical.

I posit that you almost definitely prefer imperial measurements because that's what you grew up with, and consequently have the most familiarity, experience, and comfort with.

And that's okay.

But it doesn't speak to objective practicality.

Papercraft - somewhat aside, have you looked at how ISO A series paper sizes [0] are determined? Now that's an exercise in gorgeous and thoughtful standards design.

I'll point out that I do a fair bit of woodwork too, and my equipment - rules, squares, drop and band saws, router table markings, screws, bolts, drill bits, etc - are all metric. I have a tiny number of imperial items (eg a dovetail jig from a company in North America) but they tend to not have to interact with any metric gear, and finding metric versions of these tools is difficult/expensive.

All of us metric-only people (let's say ~95% of the world) are just fine using what they grew up with to make & build stuff -- so it's going to be hard to demonstrate that imperial is 'more practical'.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#A_series

I feel I should share this -- it's an explanation provided in the Leigh dovetail jig manual for why two things share the same scale. Leigh's based in Canada, which appears to be nominally metric, but I gather most of their market is the other part of North America (which obviously isn't).

I bought the metric version of this jig - and I'm ecstatic they make this. The metric measurements are just different scales & translations - they didn't redesign the device at all.

Decimals don't slow me down, but comparing fractions with different denominators does.

Most of the manual they mention metric values in parenthesis, but in some sections it seems the authors just, understandably, gave up.

I'm perversely envious of people who can effortlessly make sense of this:

"""

Section 8-23 : Why are the 1⁄2" and 11⁄16" [12,7 & 17,5mm] pin widths on the same scale line?

1⁄2" through dovetails are routed using a 7⁄16" guidebush.

11⁄16" through dovetails are routed with a 5⁄8" guidebush.

That's a 3⁄16" difference in size between the two bits ... and between the two guidebushes.

The 5⁄8" diameter guidebush for 11⁄16" joints requires that the guide fingers be opened up by 3⁄16".

This automatically makes the pins 3⁄16" wider but on the same scale setting.

"""

(From https://leightools.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/D4R-Pro-Us... )

This is clip of the reality show American Chopper, where a bunch of native imperial unit users, professional mechanics are trying to calculate fractions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUpwa0je6_Y

This conversation would never happen in a metric shop if the people there are above 2nd grade in their arithmetic skills.

That was hilarious, though the problem was the older guy kept changing his measurements, not the actual calculation. (I don't even use Imperial and was able to calculate the difference in my head as he said them (the young guy was correct each time)).

I agree that (at least part of) my preference comes from familiarity but I am not convinced that it is caused 100% by familiarity.

I happened to see this brief interaction in a video [0] the other day that pretty accurately illustrates my point of view. In summary: 2 makers (one german, one american) working on a device are looking at parts in hand to design as they build and one says "...if you put this 15 millimeters in from the edge. about half an inch". They first physically see/feel the distance they believe to be correct is 1.5 or 15 metric units (cm or mm) or 1 imperial unit (half inch). This is the case I find comes up frequently for me. Measures where moving a cut to line up to whole cm is too far and I end up working with half and quarter centimeters or awkward counts of millimeters.

Though, it is definitely possible that 15mm only felt right in that case due to familiarity with imperial measures and that 1cm or 2cm would have been fine.

I guess the "trick" is that even though 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 inch are all technically divisions of an inch, they all function in practice as distinct whole units that are (typically) easily converted. So when you are doing work in that scale range you have many options to match what you are working with.

Paper sizes are also another good example of what I am talking about. An imperial "letter" size page is 8 and 1/2 by 11 inches. To cut one in half in either direction, the calculation is easy: horizontal 8 divided by 2 is 4 plus 1/2 divided by 2 is 1/4 or vertical 11 divided by 2 is 5 and 1/2. The similar ISO size (A4) is 210mm x 297mm would be cut at 10.5cm or 14.85cm. Sure you could just pull two A6 out of the drawer instead of cutting one A4 but then you are using ISO216 as your units of measure instead of cm/mm. In terms of practicality, cutting material stock in half is a pretty basic operation.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxLOoriXkMc&feature=youtu.be...

> 1.5 (cm) or 1 imperial unit (half inch).

Can I ask why you consider consider 0.5 inches to be 'one unit' - but think 1.5 cm is not?

For me, a unit is akin to atomicity.

But units don't dictate what size something is or should be - that's what multiples are for.

> Measures where moving a cut to line up to whole cm is too far and I end up working with half and quarter centimeters or awkward counts of millimeters.

It's a poor tape measure that does not show mm.

Similarly it would be a poor tape measure that does not show 1/32 of an inch.

The fact that your measuring device shows these gradations doesn't mean your design needs to be aligned to any arbitrary subset of multiples / divisors though, surely?

> I guess the "trick" is that even though 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 inch are all technically divisions of an inch, they all function in practice as distinct whole units that are (typically) easily converted. So when you are doing work in that scale range you have many options to match what you are working with.

1/16th of an inch isn't just technically a division of an inch. : )

When you're working down to something tiny, both measurement systems will be able to represent absolute distances just fine - do we agree on that?

It's a matter of whether manipulating those numbers is easy or difficult (for me, working with wood almost always means working with integers - mm - so all calculations are delightfully easy). Refer my other post about the Leigh dovetail jig description of router bit and bush sizes - there's 4 different dividends in use in just that one short paragraph, so you have to convert them all to common denominators before doing any mental arithmetic with them.

> When you're working down to something tiny, both measurement systems will be able to represent absolute distances just fine - do we agree on that?

Yes. I guess it was implied by omission but I don't think either system is bad. My original statement was: "I wouldn't call imperial measures 'broken'"

> Can I ask why you consider consider 0.5 inches to be 'one unit' - but think 1.5 cm is not?

>1/16th of an inch isn't just technically a division of an inch. : )

Because I don't think of 1.5 inches as 1 inch + 0.5 inches, I tend to think of 1.5 inches instead as three 1/2-inches. What I mean by stating that while 1/16 is (and 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 are) "technically" divisions of the inch, they are _practically_ (or effectively) separate whole units that you step up or down to the same way you convert up or down between mm and cm.

I find sub-dividing material (or design) by a power of two to be very common. Working with metric units, this tends to always lead to handling multiples of 5 which I tend to find more difficult than handling multiples of 2.

Working with imperial inches and subdivisions of an inch in this way (for "normal" sized projects of the type mentioned in previous comments) means there are more options to match "whole" units to the specific measurement and you generally make new measurements in your work by changing units and adding/subtracting integer values of that unit. It is literally practical because it was derived from existing practices and matches them inherently.

As someone who grew up with metric measurements, I could easily use the exact same "practicality" arguments against the imperial system.

To me, an inch is a weird measurement that is slightly longer than 2cm, a mile is a bit farther than 1.5km, a gallon is about 4 litres, and I always have to lookup up what ounces are (let alone fluid ounces -- which I have to constantly remind myself are not the same thing). But that isn't because the imperial system is "less practical" in any meaningful sense -- it's just that I didn't grow up with it and so I have to constantly convert back to the system I know (and since the conversions will never be nice integer ratios, of course your "native" measuring system will appear to work better).

As for the whole "imperial fractions are easier to deal with" thing, I personally disagree but I suspect that's also because I'm not used to the idea. In everyday life I'm so used to seeing decimal quantities that from a young age I learned how to quickly deal with them. However, I must admit I struggle to handle fractions as quickly because it isn't as common as decimal division in my everyday life. I imagine the inverse is probably true for people who have dealt with fractional quantities their entire lives. I hasten to point out that most people wouldn't say nor think of 1.5cm as "1 centimetre and 5 millimetres", just as you wouldn't say nor think of 1⅝ inches as "1 inch and 5 eighths-of-an-inch".

Honestly this whole argument has always felt pointless to me -- is it not obvious that you will always find things you are most familiar to be the best tools for the job? It's almost like watching an Englishman and a Frenchman hotly debating which language is uniquely better suited to writing poetry -- all the while ignoring that equally brilliant poetry has been written in both languages.

> It's almost like watching an Englishman and a Frenchman hotly debating which language is uniquely better suited to writing poetry -- all the while ignoring that equally brilliant poetry has been written in both languages.

I think the French won that argument when they managed to kill off English alliterative verse.

Also feet, my goodness, is it annoying to read anything with distances given in feet. 600 feet! Wow, that's a long— wait, no, it's about 200 metres, not 600 metres, so not that long a distance. A thousand feet! No, that's not even close to a kilometre, that's just slightly more than 300 metres. And so on.

Really wish book translators would translate the units inside as well. In fiction the exact numbers don't matter much, so that'd be perfectly fine.

To me it sounds mostly that you like it because you're used to it. For me doing DIY projects in mm feels very natural (basically every measure is an integer), much more so than seeing videos of Americans juggling fractions.

I recently started watching some metalworking videos, and Americans in those use 'thou' (more confusingly aka 'mil') - thousandths of an inch. That seems mostly fine to me, it's a different scale, but whatever, it's just as sane if you don't need it to interact with volumetric measurements etc.

Woodworkers obviously don't need or want the accuracy of the 'thou' digit, but it seems to me that similarly normalising on decimal fractions and using 'huns' or 'around 12x thou' would be an improvement.

But then, they're used to it and happy with it, it's only viewers like me who aren't that are thinking about it!

(I'm British, so use Imperial in some contexts, including casually sizing small things in inches, but probably never fractional other than 1/2".)

A thou was in very common use in the uk in engineering before the switch to metric.

Oh I don't doubt it, I'm not saying it's some weird or wonderful exclusively American thing, I'm just too young to be aware of it from anywhere else, and suggesting that it or similar (tenths, hundredths) would be an improvement on 2^x denominated fractions even in applications that don't need such accuracy.

Put another way, I think if everyone (not just precision applications) used decimalised inches, it would just be a different scale and ~nobody would care to say 'omg why don't you use metric'.

The primary advantage of metric is that everyone else uses it. The decimal is useful, but fractions have their place as well, so there isn't a clear win.

It turns out that the thou is a great division for metal working. The even metric are just a little too course, or a little too fine for most metal work. Either way though machinists do great work in either system, to the same fine standards.

It's just about what you are used to. For people who've grown up with metric units, it's natural to work with them.

Not really, you can learn. I spent quite a bit of effort in my twenties to convert myself over to metric for heights, weighing food, measuring liquids and such (I'm from UK).

UK had been officially metric my whole life and EU were at the time mandating pricing in metric.

Supermarkets were very reticent to use metric - or at least flouted the regulation, presumably as prices seem lower in pounds (UK 'lb') than kilograms. Now I find they often don't show weights but hide behind pack sizes for fruit pricing; presumably to prevent customers comparing. They do still have scales but it's a PITA weighing half your produce.

Getting comfortable so I could 'feel' what a particular mass (and £/kg) of apples was, say, took effort for me. Same with heights, and shifting to using kg for person-masses too.

Do you use "deko" (dekagrams) for buying meat in UK?

No, grams & kg.

Makes much more sense, I never understood why everything is in g or kg and meat is in dg :) It's not like you buy 10 grams of pork :)

> Now I find they often don't show weights but hide behind pack sizes

Not legal, btw, unless you mean e.g. 'Lemons £1 (12p/ea.)?

The usual complaint is that the denominators haven't been standardised, so you might get A selling lemons /ea. and B selling them /100g.

But then, when they are literally sold as a number (or a rough number) in a net, as opposed to being weighed and stickered, even if there were a /100g (or whatever) price, it'd be +/- 10% or something. (That actually is standardised, that funny 'e' symbol for net weight, but the tolerances vary with nominal figure, so I'm not sure off-hand what it is at 100g.)

I have relatives in the UK, and lived in London for several years -- the rage that the popular media was able to incite about metric (mostly through outright lies) in the older generation there is astonishing. Even more so they've managed to maintain that for some decades. I guess this is how they ended up leaving the EU.

In Australia supermarkets are obliged to have a pricing per 100gm for every packaged item on the shelves.

It's slightly smaller print, of course, but it's clearly legible and allows for a wonderfully simple price comparison.

EDIT: Btw, this story came out a while ago, and includes a fascinating montage clip from 1978 - a vox pop of UK citizens, obviously the most whacky people are chosen - but it's a magnificent blend of dumb (you'll use more petrol because you don't get as many kilometres to the gallon) and sad (I don't want to be part of a community).

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2019/feb/05/w...

The UK has the same rule for "per 100g" etc (depending on the object, the unit changes -- herbs are shown per 10g, potatoes per 1kg).

There are some exceptions, supposed to help market traders sell 6 apples etc. The supermarkets are using those, which I think was unexpected when these exceptions were allowed.

as far as i know, the 100g weight rule is standard across the EU. I have seen it on virtually any packaging i could find, with the exception of packaged fruits etc. (which obviously come per piece).

Carpentry/Construction is done in millimetres (with the occasional length shortened to metres). I've never heard anyone use cm.

Eg: to pay for some timber at bunnings you might say: "ninety by fourty-five. one length at two-four". (90x45mm timber, 2.4m long). On site - if you needed to cut it - you would measure and cut at "twenty-three-fourty-two" (eg: 2.342m or 2342mm)

I thought that there's a slight advantage because some imperial measures are 12-based instead of 10? So it's easier to get 1/6, 1/4, 1/3 or 1/2?

Otherwise I observe that many things like fitness devices look way more bulky when they're from the US. I have the feeling that it's partially because of the system you use, since people tend to gravitate to whole numbers you might say "a 2" bar would be about right" and somebody from Germany would make it 4cm instead. Both whole numbers but the German fitness machine would be sleeker.

In an ideal world we would count 12-based and use the metric system.

Quarters and halfs are as easy (I'd even say easier) in metric: 0.5 and 0.25 and the nice thing is you don't need to convert fractions to add/substract them.

2.75 - 1.5 is much easier for me than 2 and 3/4 - 1 and 1/2

Another advantage is that half cm is roughly a quarter inch, so you usually don't need to go down to quarters, just use wholes and halves (or millimeters if you need precision).

I'm not sure imperial is easier for thirds in practice. I have 2 by 4 inches (5x10 cm) board and want to drill 2 equally spaced holes at 2/3 inches and 4/3 inches into it - how would I do this? There's no 1/3rd inch on an imperial ruler?

I google and I got this :)

https://science.blurtit.com/1709608/where-is-13-of-a-inch-lo...

I agree base 12 or base 60 "decimals" would be the best of both worlds.

All of those qualities you assign to imperial measurement seem likely due to years of use and experience. No one I know who grew up in a metric-only (in practicality, "metric-mostly") environment feels this way about imperial measurement, and they all wax on at length about the elegance of metric, very similarly to how you did about imperial measurement.

It seems that context and experience are more responsible for the comfort with a particular measurement system than anything inherent to any particular measurement system.

Same with woodworking. Dyadics are super useful and American rulers are marked as such, usually 1/16ths. But then trying to do mental math requires base 10 decimals mixed with dyadics, so you get 5's everywhere. Compounding this, dimensional lumber involves lots of multiples of 1.5".

If I could get a natively dozenal (or seximal) calculator with a decent UX, it'd probably be worth it to relearn mental math (common times and divs) in base 12 or 6.

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