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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

> I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric

I’m not American and laughed at this.

Welcome to the other side. Also, here in New Zealand people seem to do everything in metric, except their height and the weight of their baby. Why?

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As a Frenchman living in the US, my favorite Imperial units are the hand (3 hands to a foot) and the poppyseed (4 poppyseeds to a barleycorn, the shoe-size unit; 3 barleycorns to an inch). 10cm and 2mm.

People stop asking me to convert to Imperial pretty quick.

Save your sanity, don't bother learning the conversion factors. Did you know that most of us don't even know how to convert between our own units? I invite you to go around and ask 'how many pints are in a gallon?'.

It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that there are four quarts in a gallon...

I have no such trouble with any SI unit. So with that, I will leave you with this!

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'The French were right again!'"

> Save your sanity, don't bother learning the conversion factors.

They were drilled into my brain when I was in primary school: 10, 100 and 1000.

Even before real school started, I think many of us in Europe played with base ten blocks. As far as I know they are always centimetre-sized, so the 1000-cube is a litre.

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

The US doesn't and never has used the imperial system, as it did not participate in the unit reforms of 1824.

5 us gallons is about 4 imperial gallons.

I know that, but Americans don't and ask for "Imperial". No one has ever asked me for "US customary". Either way, I am using those units to be facetious more than compliant ;-)

In practice the volume units are a much bigger problem. I have not hit anyone with the "cubic hand" yet...

The US uses the US customary system, not Imperial. [0] US customary and Imperial share some units, and, confusingly, share even more unit names, but they are different systems.

[0] well, really, it uses metric with a redefined version of the old US customary system layered over it to prevent people from noticing, but...

We've made an inconsistent and confusing system even more inconsistent and confusing. How apropos!

Hey, don't blame us for Britain going stone-mad after the Revolution and redefining all of their units in crazy ways. We weren't a part of it.

Now, choosing wine gallons as our standard gallon, that might deserve a little blame.

That's a fairly long-standing pre-metric tradition.

In Sweden, 1 foot was around 28.96cm (in modern dimensions), whilst 1 foot in Amsterdam was 28.31cm.

On such differences (OK, and a few other contributing factors) a ship was sunk.

In 1776 everyone was still using the Winchester System. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_measure The UK didn't adopt the Imperial system until 1824-1826. Us Yanks have to suffer the indignity of our meager 473 mililitre pints.

I am 100% convinced that the baby weight thing is because grandparents love to compare newborns with their own experiences, and they were on the cusp of the metric conversion in the 60s. In a decade or two, this will vanish.

Imperial height is because 6 feet is the generic height of a "tall person" - we get so much of our sporting news from overseas and no one bothers to convert it.

5 m = 1 rod; 5 furlong = 1 km.

Also, the US doesn't use imperial, dammit. It uses US customary units. They're related but different systems with radically different definitions on many units.

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