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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

Americans will measure with anything except the metric system.

Funny story: I was in Spain several years ago and was talking to a guy I met about sailboats. I mentioned I had a boat, and he asked how big. I thought for a second and said "7 meters" so as not to be an ignorant American. He thought for a second and said "huh, 21 feet".

Except it’s closer to 23 feet right?

If you carry a calculator in your pocket, but if you're just casually converting, 3 feet per meter is pretty good. 100 square meters is about 1000 square feet as well. Not legal for tax purposes, but good enough to understand how big a place is.

40 inches per meter is easy to remember and pretty accurate

how many inches per feet ?

12 inches per foot 3 feet per yard 1760 yards per mile

Or ten feet per three meters, since longer distances are rarely measured in inches anyhow.. The proverbial ten foot pole is 3048 mm long.

The only time anyone wants to know the exact length of a sailboat is if there’s a concern about it fitting in some space.

At all other times, your incentive is to make the biggest lie you can get away with.

I'm not sure what the situation is in other European countries, but in the UK we use different units depending on the use so most people are use to working with both imperial and metric.

Perhaps with the exception of fahrenheit most people here will know what you mean if you use units like feet and will often even prefer thinking in feet over metres for certain things. Personally I default to feet for something like height or a floorplan, although I can think in metres quite easily too.

Same thing in Canada.

No, not many people in continental Europe are comfortable with miles, feet and inches.

But sailboat length is traditionally measured in feet. Same for aircraft altitude.

So sailors and aviators are more likely to use feet (and nautical miles) as measurement.

And knots. Speed limits at sea in Norway (in harbours and other places with much traffic and little room for maneuvering) are always in knots. But we measure water depth in meters, not fathoms.

Nautical miles have nothing to do with imperial units.

It's now defined in reference to SI meter, but it originates as 1/60th of a degree of latitude.

> it originates as 1/60th of a degree of latitude.

So ... not even a fixed length but one that varies by latitude

(given the Earth is an oblate spheroid | rotated ellipsoid | flattened sphere)

that's something on the order of 20 metres of sloppiness by my reckoning.

Yep, 18m between the poles and the equator.

…which is why the French Navy (who originally defined the unit) switched it to be SI derived in 1906 and the international standard was updated in 1929.

In Germany, the only things I can think of off the top of my head is bicycles(wheels) and screens, which we measure in inches instead of cm.

But I couldn't even tell you how many cm to an inch. I just know how big a 40" TV or a 28" bike is.

Here in Czechia, TV screens are in cm, but computer monitors are in inches.

Funnily enough, about ~15 years ago TVs were still in cm, but somehow when flat screens came along (and people generally bought much bigger TVs) we switched to using inches. Computer screens have always been inches afaict.

In Japan if you buy, say, a 65" TV, it will be labeled a "65 style" with a note that it's about 160 cm diagonal (panel inch sizes are never exact).

The main exception? MacBooks. Those will be labeled e.g. "14 inch" (14インチ).

It is sailing lingo to use feet and (nautical) mile.

Measuring boats in feet is a tradition. Also, these numbers are bigger. 50 feet is a big boat. Compare with mere 15 meters. BTW, docking price lists are still in meters.

1/40,000,000 of the Earth’s circumference does not make sense to me, but the foot does. (As does the school bus.)

The foot is just a light nanosecond, it makes perfect sense.

it isn't precisely a light nanosecond either, it's about 5mm off. today the standard foot as used in the USA is ironically just defined as 0.3048 meters

And the surveyors’ foot is 500000/499999 times that. Not sure how that came to be.

Agreed. There’s this weird idea we should have the same UX for everything. In practicality we need different scales. I don’t describe the distance between myself and my neighbor in light years.

Exactly! In fact, it would be wonderful if you had some standard way of producing different units at different scales for a given magnitude, upwards or downwards, so you could use the best in a given context. Perhaps you could even randomly chose a fixed easy multiplier to automatically produce these derived units from the fundamental unit, and then use the same factor for every magnitude. You only need to chose some base unit for every magnitude and then, boom, you get a full family of units at different scales to chose from depending on your context.

How cool would that be? I'd suggest to use a factor that is the easiest to multiply by, in order to simplify operations. I guess the optimal factor would be 10. What is easier to multiply or divide by than 10, right?

I think I need to patent this bright idea. It's amazing nobody has thought about it before.

Sure, the definition of a meter may be a little bit arbitrary. But the advantage of metric for measuring distances is that the units are all factors of 10.

10 mm = 1 cm

10 cm = 1 dm

10 dm = 1 m

1000 m = 1 km

Makes math and scaling up and down a lot easier than having to remember that

12 in = 1 ft

3 ft = 1 yd

5280 ft = 1 mi

1760 yd = 1 mi

For sure...

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/36593/20220314/asteroi...

it's ironic because as a little kid in the US in the late 1970s we all learned the metric system, but we see the "imperial" system everywhere still....like the conversion just never got around to happening. it's confusing.

look at the stupidest congressman of your choice (party doens't matter) that who you have to convince to convert the US over to the metric system. that is why we still use imperial

I think it just comes down to preference since the government never mandated it.

Science and engineering all use metric in the US. Automative all moved to metric voluntarily. I know construction is still imperial.

Its mostly consumer facing things that still imperial. And if you go to Canada its pretty common to see $/lb printed along side $/kg. People often talk about height in feet and inches, weight in pounds.

Its really not that different.

Science and engineering all use metric in the US

Machinists still do a lot of work in inches.

Yes but in base 10.

Machines last for decades and can’t practically support multiple standards. There’s an enormous amount of inertia in such a system.

Similarly aviation uses feet for altitude in most countries.

I read somewhere that it was traveling at about three football fields per Abraham Lincoln fart.

baked beans or cauliflower?

broccoli cheddar, it was a fast balloon

As a European I still don't know how their football fields compare to our football fields. I mentally assume they are the same to have a frame of comparison.

They are pretty much similar, though an actual football (soccer pitch) field is not fixed measures, 90-120 m in length and 45-90 m in width.

In this the american football field seems more "reliable" as a unit of measure, seemingly fixed to 91.44 x 48.8 m or 100 yards x 160 feet + the borders that may vary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_football_field

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch

Personally I "convert" a "football field" to half an hectare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare

or 100 x 50 m.

This is such a tired cliche. The actual history is far more interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_St...

The US was an original signatory of the Meter Convention. Our customary units have been based on metric units since 1893. Our food packaging features metric units. Our scientists use metric units. Our school children learn the metric system. Our military uses the metric system. Our cars are built with metric fasteners.

Changing informal habits takes decades and has questionable benefit. Canada tried it in the 70s and is going to take another generation at least to fully convert for informal use.

Speaking as a Canadian, I’d be surprised if we ever fully culturally metrify, specifically when it comes to height and weight. We just consume too much American media which uses convenient imperial bars like 6’ or 200lbs to ever change, I think.

I actually think we’re somewhat lucky in that most of us can immediately grok a measurement in either system when we see one online.

I don't think you can blame American media. Canada can trace its usage of Imperial units to the British Empire. The United States of America as an independent nation has never at any point in its history used Imperial units. US Customary units share some of the names but it is a different system. This refinement of units continued globally and with international collaboration became the metric (si) system. The US historically had closer ties to France than Britain so the systems diverged literally centuries ago.

Canadian metrication follows the rest of the British empire which was centuries behind the rest of the world (including the US) in metrication.

the legalized cannabis industry is doing all it can, man.

Won't touch the metric system with a 10ft pole.

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