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Comment by temp0826 | Hacker News Reader

Kilopounds might be my new favorite unit (though libraries of congress will always hold a special place in my heart).

American wire gauge is better. They defined zero as 8.251 mm diameter so for thicker wires they had to use multiple zeros. And for some reason many Americans write it as (1/0) which looks like one divided by zero. And its pronounced "one aught." It also has no resemblence to barrel gauge for firearms even though they follow a similar principle of increasing gauge leading to decreasing diameter. For example a 12 gauge shotgun barrel is much larger than a zero gauge wire. Interestingly firearm gauges never hit zero. Total disaster.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_(firearms)

George Washington said no to the kilopound: https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=GaKxqs-iV89PXUfV

And this plot's area is about 390 nanowaleses.

I for one think kilograms make sense. You know the, uhm, metric system.

Not very salty about this. This is just an Internet comment.

Sure you can use metric, but only if you’re going to be reporting something like the number of kg of individuals covered by universal healthcare. Otherwise it’s best to stick to freedom units.

I've never had trouble converting between different measuring systems, why do metric folks complain constantly about it?

The fussy American units help our mental acuity - constant brain training in everyday life. Metric is too easy, makes you soft!

On the contrary, as a stupid American, I'm grateful for the imperial system because it doesn't require much thinking at all.

The intuitiveness of the imperial units actually don't demand much thinking from my American pea brain: an inch is about the width of my thumb, a pound is about the weight of how much meat/grain I can fit in my hands, a mile is about a thousand paces - it's actually quite simple and intuitive, which is perfect for a dumb stupid American like me.

I can't imagine doing something like woodworking without my brainlet system. Inches are a nice "bite-size" unit that fractionates quite nicely for cutting wood. They don't make me think too much. In metric, my thumb would be about 2.53 centimeters, the kerf of my saw is 1/8 an inch, and that's like 253/800cm as a fraction - yikes! An inch is a good whole number to start working from.

And then like - what's a centimeter even? It's one hundredth of one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator passing through Paris. Woah - get me outta here! That's just too much numerology for me. And my brain can't relate to or conceptualize that. Again, because I'm just so stupid, and American. I have to stick to the simple stuff: thumb -> inch, pound -> fits in my hands, mile -> thousand paces, gallon -> 10 pounds of water.

> And then like - what's a centimeter even?

About the thickness of your pinkie.

A kilo is about 1/2 a lb so it's not really wildly different.

> pound -> fits in my hands

> gallon -> 10 pounds of water.

How do you do 10 handfuls of water?

It's so intuitive he does it naturally

Not like that arrogant metric, for which he can find no useful representation...for some reason

A reason that is clearly about the utility of metric itself rather than one's constant use of imperial.

Uh, you meant that a pound is about 1/2 kg, not the other way around.

Woops! You are correct.

A gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds, so your estimate of 10 pounds is about 20% too high. To add to what someone else posted in terms of metric to “intutive” equivalences, 1 km is about 600 paces (for me, it’s also the distance from my house to the Asian market)

People living in metric countries have these sorts of “intuitive” relationships figured out. If you ever go to Europe, you will not see people anxiously furrowing their brows over their calculators to figure out how much things weigh or how far it is to the end of the block.

And, of course, there’s an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/526/

It's easy enough to skip on the exercise if you wish. All my measuring tools support metric right next to imperial. All the food on the shelf at the market is measured both ways. I can live a metric life if I want to.

So YOU'RE one of those slow drivers on the highway causing traffic and making everyone unsafe! ;)

We've only lost a couple spacecraft to metric/imperial conversions! What's a few hundred million here or there...

time is base 12 or 60, ounces are base 16, feet back to 12, but miles are base 5,280

Be fair: the mile is either base 8 (furlongs) or base 1000 (paces). 5280 is an arbitrary complication.

Speaking as someone who grew up with the metric system before moving to America: Because growing up, we never had to convert between different measuring systems.

Everything was easy to do in your head:

5cm + 15cm = 20cm

0.5kg + 0.15kg = 0.65kg

2900mm / 2 = 1450mm.

Now I'm forced to do mental gymnastics like:

5/8" + 7/16" = ???

2'9 1/4" + 14" = ???

11'4"1/4 / 2 = ???

1lb9oz / 2 = ???

It's not impossible, but it takes me a lot more time to think through these things, and often they are impossible to even punch into a calculator. Adding fractions of an inch in my head was not something I learned in school (honestly, my experience since moving to the US is that most adult Americans also struggle to add fractions of an inch).

There's give and take. A unit based on 1/12th makes one third, one half, and one quarter all even divisions.

It's just not that big a deal in my experience. And if I want to use millimeters, every ruler and tape measure has those too. For all the bitching about the US not using metric, we in fact use it for many things. But it's customary to use imperial for discussion, and I don't get why that hurts people's feelings. I don't care about the UK weighing people in stones...

Yeah, ability to employ both systems and translate between them is quite useful. It might be similar to native bilingualism.

Even outside of the legacy imperial unit systems, there will always be units not nicely expressed in metric units that are handy nevertheless and good to know and use. Like electron-volts.

This was one consequence:

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

Now that you're mentioning that, why doesn't the default calculator app on a phone have prominent functionality for that, it's so useful in everyday life.

"Converting between units is a useful skill" - is it intrinsically useful or just useful because we are forced to do it with the status quo?

Is anything intrinsically useful? Or intrinsically anything, for that matter?

I think at this point, “metric folks” are the majority and “imperial folks” are the stubborn minority

Sure. But it's the constant bitching about it. We know, we know, you [metaphorically, not you personally necessarily] like metric better. The US uses metric for all kinds of things, in fact! And the UK still uses imperial for some things. Conversions are not hard, and hearing people bitch about it in every thread is tedious.

Aside from some internet memery, no one cares too much if you use metric or imperial, but mixing the two is a special kind of accursed.

Metric is more clean. Example: you have a cube of 1 meter, filled halfway with water. You can calculate the volume of water as being 1 * 1 * 0.5 cubic meter. 1 cubic meter is 1000 liter (ho ho, the magic already manifests), so 0.5 cubic meter is 500 liter. I even know the approximate weight is 500kg, as 1 liter of water ≈ 1 kilo.

Doing this in cubic yards/feet + fluidic ounce + pounds is not even in the same universe in terms of elegance or ease-of-use. Swapping the fluidic ounce to liter does not solve that and probably introduces whackier ratios.

That does not mean you are a bad person for using imperial, but stating that "its easy to convert" isn't wholly fair either.

quite relevant essay: stubbornness as a minority is power https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

They can empathize with others.

On that note, learning other languages is too hard. Everyone should just speak what I do.

The reason is that as a physicist I was taught the SI system, which is a superset of the metric system both completely logical.

Part of the marketing strategy in getting the U.S. and other minorities to adopt the metric system has been to attach a morality component to it, which results in any dissent being met with shaming and emotional appeals, as the morality component supersedes the logical component.

Not morals. Pure logic.

Soldier: “But what will a thousand pounds be called General Washington?”

Washington: “Nothing”

Wouldn't short tons be much more customary? So 3.5 short tons.

I had to look that up, I had no idea there was such a thing as a ton that isn’t 1000 kg.

"Ton[ne]" is pretty overloaded as units go.

* metric ton; 1000kg

* short ton; 907kg

* long ton; 1016kg

not to mention its use as a measure of volume and power.

Ah yes, the kip.

Confused the hell out of me when I went from nice clean metric units in school to a structural engineering practice still using Us standard units.

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