The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
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Man, the progressive school (Comanche Elementary in Overland Park, Kansas!) must have had a huge impact on my life. In addition to open classrooms (I was in Unit 5, not 4th Grade), team teaching, a focus on experimental science, a circular layout to the school with a sunken (architecturally) library in the center…
Yeah, we went over the Metric System that whole year. I can still sing the "Metric Family" song from the film on metric units ("Kilo", "Milli", etc.). And to my young and impressionable mind, the U.S. was joining the rest of the "Free World" in a kind of Star-Trek-like casting aside of the old things that divided us—joining each other with a focus on progress, science, space…
President Carter came along around the same time or shortly after. And I have a photo of a family road trip to South Dakota, Montana: the sign that indicates the altitude of a particular mountain pass has both feet and meters. I Google-mapped the same location recently and of course it's no longer in meters.
I feel like in my elementary school days (the 1970's) the U.S. was on the cusp of a future of optimism—no doubt buoyed by having put astronauts on the Moon, but I was wildly on board for it.
But then some kind of shit seemingly started to poison the country. I don't feel we have ever returned to that level of national optimism. Perhaps 1976, the Bicentennial, was the end of it. (Recently watching the film "Nashville" brought me back a bit of the vibe of the times.)
I've been missing it my entire life since.
I’ve always found this peculiar because at times I have felt the same, but reflecting over the years and I guess as my mind settling on lived experience and opinions I’ve come to appreciate the Imperial system far more precisely because of its absurdities but also because of its history and usefulness without instrument.
As someone who, well, finds say Renaissance or Impressionist art to so far be the peak of human artistry, I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity in contrast to Frank Lloyd Wright, Banksy, minimalism, and the cold calculation of the more “scientific” metric system.
Underneath that all is also this view that the United States at least needs to “join the world” and adopt Metric, and soccer, and such and I find myself increasingly rejecting both and other similar notions in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity.
I hope we never change sustems, and I don’t think we will anytime soon. If we do, however, we should not switch to Celsius because the useful scale of Fahrenheit is far superior 0-100 versus 0-32. Celsius isn’t very Metric-y.
But the other issue with that property specifically is that it seems to be that it is built out of fear of humanity and that’s why elements of the property (again from photos) look like what you’d see in a bunker or if you were trying to hide. It lacks symmetry as well which introduces fear.
You can think of it as how one might feel looking at a painting of Dance in the Country by Renoir and Guernica by Picasso. If you find the former to be near perfection, full of vibrancy, warmth, and love you may as I do find Picasso’s work to be chaotic, disheveled, asymmetric, or even psychotic.
Amazing that FLW is still traumatizing conservatives 100 years later. Ayn Rand was a fan, didn’t you know?
Picasso was trying to convey the feeling of being bombed from the sky in a civil war, so at least your reading there is accurate.
No, I was speaking about the exterior. The blending in of the surroundings, and hiding of things like the entrance are the hallmark of post-war architectural trends. Not that I'm claiming Lloyd suffered from the same PTSD that returning American veterans did, but his building follows some of the same patterns.
For example, here: where's the door? http://www.wright-house.com/frank-lloyd-wright/fallingwater-...
But moving to the widows, even from that photo you can see how while the interior gives the occupants a nice view, the exterior hides them - sort of like a bunker.
> Through asymmetry? What then of William Blake’s “fearful symmetry”?
Idk, can you elaborate? We know as a matter of scientific study that asymmetry in architectural design introduces stress, let me know if you'd like a source in case you are curious.
> Amazing that FLW is still traumatizing conservatives 100 years later. Ayn Rand was a fan, didn’t you know?
I don't understand this comment. Why would I care what Ayn Rand thinks or thought?
> Picasso was trying to convey the feeling of being bombed from the sky in a civil war, so at least your reading there is accurate.
Sure. But in that interpretation I find cold, calculating, death, and fear. None of which I find particularly attractive in art. And Picasso in these years is probably the best "good" example of this style of art. Afterwards it gets more and more psychotic to the point where you've got the whole banana taped to a wall for $6 million. Western artists have forgotten what art is and what the purpose of it is, in my opinion.
You may find this lecture of interest. I'm sorry I don't have anything shorter to read offhand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjezxPl3FA
-edit- This might get you closer though to the general theory:
https://asla-ncc.org/the-built-environment-impacts-our-healt...
Intuitively it doesn't resonate with me. The environment humans evolved in (the natural world) doesn't have much of anything symmetrical, unless it was built by humans.
The research and science being done is measuring levels of stress relative to shapes and designs of buildings through eye-tracking software. So to really over-simplify, buildings that are asymmetrical or perhaps where the door is hard to find, or in some urban environments there specific features that cause stress and it is measurable.
> The environment humans evolved in (the natural world) doesn't have much of anything symmetrical, unless it was built by humans.
https://www.sciencekids.co.nz/images/pictures/plants/flower....
But windows are exterior? The idea that massing of interior influences the form of the exterior is part of Wright's philosophy. I don't believe you know what you speak of.
> The blending in of the surroundings, and hiding of things like the entrance are the hallmark of post-war architectural trends. Not that I'm claiming Lloyd suffered from the same PTSD that returning American veterans did, but his building follows some of the same patterns.
First I've heard the sensitivity to natural surroundings was because of war. Wright lived through the Spanish-American war and the Great War, but completed Fallingwater before WW2 (which is what we generally mean by "postwar.")
> For example, here: where's the door? http://www.wright-house.com/frank-lloyd-wright/fallingwater-...
You can look up plans online if you're really curious, but since you asked it's right there, in the shadow. Maybe stop basing architectural opinions on underexposed photos. Or is it because you want a grand entrance that announces the owner's ostentatiousness?
> I don't understand this comment. Why would I care what Ayn Rand thinks or thought?
You're espousing some conservative viewpoints, so I figured you'd be interested in others.
> Western artists have forgotten what art is and what the purpose of it is
Bizarre opinion. Artists philosophizing on the definition of art and its purpose is the defining feature of modern art. You're just mad they concluded it extends beyond Renoir's florid, gauzy depictions of girls.
Ok, then I guess we don't need to discuss anything further :)
Post-war architectural trends don't have a lot to do with the war experiences but are, since you are talking about modern architecture, a direct continuation of pre-war modern architecture.
Where is the door? This is Vila Tugendhat, finished 1930. https://www.tugendhat.eu/en/fotogalerie-vily-tugendhat-2012-...
> But moving to the widows, even from that photo you can see how while the interior gives the occupants a nice view, the exterior hides them - sort of like a bunker.
No at all? https://gaptrail.org/amenities/fallingwater/
The features that remind you of a bunker are more in the direction of brutalism (blocky, fortress like appearance but without the intent and function).
> We know as a matter of scientific study that asymmetry in architectural design introduces stress
No it does not, that's just complete nonsense. Have a walk around a really old (250+ years) historic neighborhood (preferably without a lot of tourists), it will be full of asymmetry, and then measure your stress levels. They should be through the roof, right?
BTW, Gattica only used the exterior, and I think the entry hall - which they lit very cold. The rest of their interiors were sets, and the vibe of the actual building is (appropriately for the film, but misleadingly for people - like me! - who judged it by that) pretty much the exact opposite of what you'd expect if something like the film is what you think it would be.
Well, first of all, I'm not sure why you're defining those scales as the "useful" ones. They don't even equate to each other. But why are you arbitrarily using 100 as the end of your Fahrenheit scale? Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'? If you read his paper, Fahrenheit's scale is actually 0-96.
I'm not 100% sure of the normal upper/lower bounds in everyday life for most people on the planet for Celsius, but let's say it's 0-32. It' just feels weird to me to be operating on that scale versus 0-100 where I see in every day life from battery percentages to test scores.
> Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'?
In part, yea. But I generally just prefer the Imperial system because of its practicality in everyday life and because it's fun and weird and historical in a way that Metric isn't.
100°F is warm to the touch, not smoking hot. 100°C is boiling hot. You sip tea at 60°C, and brew it at 80° to 100°C depending on the type. You cook chicken to an internal 74°C. A hair dryer blows air around 50°C. All of these are outside of 0-100°F.
> I generally just prefer the Imperial system because of its practicality in everyday life
Funny, most of us much prefer metric mainly for its practicality in everyday life.
Edit: I'll add that aesthetically, 0°C is a really nice zero point for weather. Above 0° is the temperature that the snow starts melting, below is when the streets and ground starts freezing. Which side of 0°C you're on is the biggest pivot point for what it's like outside of any temperature.
Well let me clarify, what I was saying is that where everybody lives the temperatures tend to be within that range, which is why I think it's a superior measurement for temperature related to the weather - again just additional clarification which was missing maybe from earlier comments.
Once you arrive at the point where you're measuring various things, I'm not sure it matters what scale you use so long as the values align as you expect. In other words, I don't really care whether I'm using 212 for the temperature at which water boils or 100 - it's just an association of values to action. You can swap between grams, ounces, pounds, milligrams, or kilos with your scale and it's not that important for day-to-day life. In terms of measuring temperature of things, like, say when chicken is cooked, I'm not really sure F or C is more practical. It's just different numbers.
> Once you arrive at the point where you're measuring various things, I'm not sure it matters what scale you use so long as the values align as you expect.
You can't have it both ways. The entire advantage you proposed for Fahrenheit is that the outside temperature is often between 0 and 100. It's a tiny aesthetic advantage that doesn't even work very well because 0°F isn't actually the coldest temperature we get and 100°F isn't the warmest.
You're right it doesn't matter that much if water boils at 100° or 212°. It's just different numbers. But by the same token, it doesn't matter if the warmest weather is about 100°F or 40°C. It's just a different number. At least 0°C and 100°C are actual points that mean something and are relevant to everyday life, while 0°F isn't really anything. As I said before, the weather outside changes more at 0°C than at any other temperature.
TL;DR: "The remarkable result here is that 0℉ is nearly exactly the 1st percentile of daily lows, and 100℉ is nearly exactly the 99th percentile of daily highs." NB: The context is the continental US.
Fahrenheit was created in northern Europe, using the temperature of a salt water and ice mixture as the zero calibration point. It was later adjusted to define the difference between water's freezing and boiling points to be exactly 180°, since 180 is a highly composite number with many divisors. So off the bat, it's a bit odd that 0°F and 100°F would match the 1st and 99th percentiles of population-adjusted daily highs and lows in the US with that much precision. It's a coincidence already in the sense that the creator was not aiming for this.
But it's also a coincidence because they used 2018 data, which was a particular warm year on average. (2012 was warmer, but I don't see any warmer years before 2012 in the National Weather Service's table which goes all the way back to 1875.) Average temperature across the US can vary by 3° or 4°F year to year. The population adjusted temperature should vary even more because it depends on lot on which weather systems hit the major population centers that year. I'm not sure how much the 1st and 99th percentile would change if they redid the analysis for a different year, but it would probably vary by several degrees.
It's also kind of interesting that you would never have gotten this result before around 2012 or so, due to global warming.
Arguing that it's a coincidence isn't really relevant.
I agree with the poster further up: I'm more or less good with all metric units expect temperature. While I still "feel" all the US customary units better than metric, I can intuitively "see" meters, liters, and kilograms. But Celsius continues to elude me, even after dating and being married to someone for 8+ years who grew up in a metric country.
I only called out the "nearly exactly" part of the claim. US weather is approximately in the range of 0-100°F, give or take 20 degrees. But the analysis found 0°F to be nearly exactly the first percentile of daily highs and lows, to within a twentieth of a percentile point.
It's true that US temperature is around 0°F-100°F but usually false that those temperatures are the 1st and 99th percentile.
You are entitled to your subjective experience, but keep in mind other subjective experiences exist.
That seems to be a quite arbitrary and insufficient criterion. As soon as I start cooking or preparing a warm drink I already step way outside these boundaries.
In defense of the relevance of the Celsius scale in daily life: its endpoints represent critical temperatures of the most important liquid to life on Earth at ~1 bar. And at temperatures of 0°C or less I stand at danger of not just hypothermia, but frostbite.
> it's [..] historical in a way that Metric isn't.
How so? Celsius was proposed merely 18 years (1742) after Fahrenheit (1724).
Sorry, I was attempting however poorly to reference the Imperial system historically, not Celsius versus Fahrenheit there which may have been confusing on my part.
> In defense of the relevance of the Celsius scale in daily life: its endpoints represent critical temperatures of the most important liquid to life on Earth at ~1 bar. And at temperatures of 0°C or less I stand at danger of not just hypothermia, but frostbite.
Right, incredibly important. I guess I would say I prefer Fahrenheit as a measurement of air temperature, if that would be more sensible to understanding my own personal preference. When I walk outside unless it's really cold I don't ever think about what temperature water freezes or boils, I want to know whether I am going to sweat, whether I'm in California, or whether I'm going to freeze my butt off when it's 14 degrees out.
In either system that's just a matter of remembering a few numbers. And it anyway doesn't give the full picture since humidity and wind speed play a huge role in how it actually feels like and what clothing one should wear.
Nevertheless, there are many important quantities which are proportional to temperature, e.g. pressure, internal energy, voltage generated by a bandgap reference and so on. Because of this, there are many cases, especially in qualitative reasoning, when using temperature is more convenient than using its inverse.
This is similar to waves, where in most numeric computations wave-number and frequency are more convenient, but there are also many cases, e.g. when reasoning about resonance frequencies or stationary waves, when using wave-length and periodic time is more convenient.
Another example is in electrical circuits, where for some problems using impedance and resistance is more convenient, while for others using admittance and conductance is more convenient.
Perhaps one would need a simpler name for reciprocal temperature, to facilitate its use wherever this makes sense. However, when implementing a physical model in a program, where one should always define distinct types for each kind of physical quantity, using a short type name like "RecTemp" would not stand out among the many abbreviations typically used in programs.
• Using a uniform set of prefixes to designate multiples and divisions of the base units.
Having one unit of say, volume (the liter), and then using prefixes when we need smaller or larger units is way better than having cups, pints, quarts, gallons, pecks, and many more.
• Having those prefixes mean powers of 10. That fits in well with our use of decimal arithmetic.
It is the first one that is most important.
For temperature there's nothing actually 'Metric-y' about Celsius (or Kelvin), because in most cases people don't use multiples or divisions of the base unit. This includes in science and engineering. An astronomer would say (and write in their paper) that a star has a temperature of 7000 K, not 7 kiloK. They would say a neutron star has a core temperature of 100 trillion K, not 100 TK or 100 teraK.
At the low end there is more use of prefixes. The scientists that work near absolute 0 do often use millikelvin and microkelvin. They also often don't. Both 10^-2 Kelvin and 10 mK would usually be acceptable.
A metric system with the same meter, liter, and gram as the current one but that had picked F and R instead of C and K would work fine and be just as 'Metric-y' as the current metric system.
It's more predictable over -- some things that you don't know how they're going to scale?
Again, the general thrust of "imperial" is better -- base your units on "utility of the most people using them the most for real life things"
Do whatever you want for distances between stars, but no, walking off a room in "feet" can't be beat.
What is better with metric is the consistent way to name multiples and divisions of the base units.
Metric uses power of 10 prefixes but another power could work fine. Power of 2 for example actually fits well with Imperial volume measurements, where a quart is 1/4 gallon, a pint is 1/2 quart, 1 cup is 1/2 pint, a fluid ounce is 1/8 cup, and a tablespoon is 1/2 a fluid ounce.
Just make some prefixes that mean 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, 1/128, and 1/256 and use those with gallon instead of having separate names for everything, and use the same prefixes with yards when you need a unit smaller than a yard and you'd be off to a good start. Add some prefixes that mean 2x, 4x, 8x, etc too.
Yards and gallons don't have to be the base units. Could be feet and cups or anything else. The key is prefixes to get bigger or smaller units instead of naming those others units, and using the same prefixes across unit types.
Why? For anybody who grew up in a metric country, dealing with metres is pretty damn easy. Case in point, my GF is an architect working for an US military base, and she gets royally pissed off every time she has to deal with feet and inches.
Actually, this is very problematic as well. As it stands, astronomical distances are quoted in single/thousands/millions/billions of kilometres, astronomical units (Earth-Sun distance), parsecs and kilo- and mega-, and then light-years (and thousands, millions, billions).
I would strongly prefer to use metric units: metre, kilometre, megametre, gigametre, terametre (AU is around here), petametre (parsec and light-year is around here), exametre (about a thousand light-years), zettametre (about a million light-years), yottametre (about a billion light-years). The scale ends there because the observable universe is about 886 Ym in diameter.
Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001.
> in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity
You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitely not the pinnacle of cultural uniqueness or non-conformity. Why not adopt a more esoteric and fun language for yourself such as, who knows, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.?
> in contrast to [...] the cold calculation of the more “scientific” metric system
Decimals are optimized for cold calculation, yes. Would you like to use a monetary system based on pounds, shillings, and pence - like the UK and Australia right into the 20th century? Did you know that the New York Stock Exchange traded in increments of $1/8 and later $1/16, before fully decimalizing?
Most of life is just useless facts, I think it's fun and I enjoy it.
> You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitely not the pinnacle of cultural uniqueness or non-conformity. Why not adopt a more esoteric and fun language for yourself such as, who knows, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.?
I've been learning French actually and have really enjoyed it. When I was in France recently I was able to put some of those skills to the test and found it fun and interesting to see how both difficult, and in some other cases, incredibly easy to fit in even with knowing maybe a hundred or so words and basic grammar. I speak English since that was what I grew up with. English is actually pretty fun as a language too because of the chaos of the very language itself. Read vs read, &c.
But all cultures have some things that are unique and also not very unique about them. I'm not sure why we can't just have our measuring system like we do today and that's just one unique thing about the United States.
To turn this around the other way, maybe everyone should just eat at McDonalds and conform to what's most popular and efficient?
> Decimals are optimized for cold calculation, yes. Would you like to use a monetary system based on pounds, shillings, and pence - like the UK and Australia right into the 20th century? Did you know that the New York Stock Exchange traded in increments of $1/8 and later $1/16, before fully decimalizing?
Yea sure. How many basis points is $1/8?
... Yes, I think that was unironically exactly the point.
> You're writing in impeccable English.
Which is a ornery bastard of a language with more exceptions than rules. It's about aesthetic, not popularity.
> Would you like to use a monetary system based on pounds, shillings, and pence
I wouldn't be surprised.
Your entire comment comes across like you think you're exposing contradictions that really just aren't contradictions at all.
hold on: a horizontal foot, or a vertical foot ? 0.30480061m versus 0.3048m
But each time the metre was redefined, the new definition was within the error bounds of the previous definition and the instruments that could be used within the previous definition - this ensured that backwards compatibility was retained. That's how we end up with these weird-looking numbers; it's not for fun and games.
Meanwhile, backwards compatibility was absolutely broken many times in traditional and imperial measurement systems. Heck, we have a break even in recent history: The survey foot has been discontinued in terms of the international foot, but they differ by 2 parts per million. That might not sound like much, but if you're measuring a whole continent, then being wrong by 2 ppm over 3000 km means having a discrepancy of 6 m, which is more than enough to fit an extra house in.
That’s incorrect. It’s “one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre). Different fraction, and much better defined (different circles of longitude may have different lengths)
> That was considered not accurate enough, so it was redefined as the length of a certain metallic bar kept in Paris.
I can’t find a reference, but I think it at least partially was a matter of practicality, not of accuracy. It’s not simple to measure that 10,000 km distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_measurement_of_Delambre_an...: The arc measurement of Delambre and Méchain was a geodetic survey carried out by Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain in 1792–1798 to measure an arc section of the Paris meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona. This arc measurement served as the basis for the original definition of the metre.)
Other parts of the video highlight the insanity of inconsistent and shifting definitions of imperial units such as the mile, gallon, fluid ounce, pound-force/pound-mass, etc. It's one big damning essay against pre-metric units.
Do you have problems with time too? I mean, 1 minute = 60 seconds, 1 hour = 60 minutes, but one day = 24 hours? Wtf??! And one week = 7 days! And one month is 30 unless you mean an actual month which is anywhere from 28 to 31. And the year is 365 days, unless it's a leap year with 366. How do you cope with that?
I have memorized how time and dates work, but I do not enjoy the system.
Time is my biggest sore point. For starters, doing any kind of arithmetic is an exercise in pain. For example when I rent a shared bike, the system tells me the start and end time to the second - for example, from 13:26:08 to 15:54:39. To calculate the duration, I have to combine the HMS into linear seconds, subtract the two linear timestamps, and then reformat it into HMS notation. Similarly, if I have to calculate ratios, percentages, histograms, etc., then HMS notation just gets in the way.
Have you ever tried writing logic to deal with HMS before? Here's an exercise for you (which I completed this month): Given a non-negative integer number of seconds, write out the number as a string formatted in DHMS format such that the leftmost unit cannot have leading zeros (so no 0m23s, no 09s) except for the special case of 0s, the string must be fully reduced (e.g. 83s -> 1m23s), and any non-leftmost unit must have full leading zeros (e.g. 1h2m3s -> 1h02m03s). The logic is pretty horrendous. The alternative, if everything was expressed in linear seconds, is completely trivial.
The second sore point about time notation is that although sub-second units (ms, μs, ns, etc.) are fine and dandy, any SI super-second unit (kilosecond, megasecond, etc.) is never used in practice and also has no alignment with days and years. This isn't merely a theoretical concern because that's how we get non-SI units like km/h, kW⋅h, and light-year. If ks was useful and popular, then km/ks just simplifies to m/s, whereas km/h = 3.6 m/s and kW⋅h = 3.6 MJ. Personally, I would've preferred the day to be subdivided into either a thousand or a million ticks, especially because I strongly prefer power-of-1000 prefixes (so milli- is good, centi- is bad).
As for dates, we can't get around the fact that there are roughly 365.25 days per tropical year. The Gregorian calendar is hacky because February is shorter than other months, a leap day is put at the end of February instead of the end of December, and the naming is shifted so that Sep (number 7) = 9th month, Oct (number 8) = 10th month, Nov (number 9) = 11th month, Dec (number 10) = 12th month. I think the least bad solution is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar .
>> Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize
You are correct to point out that time units have many weird names and conversion factors. Now on top of that, try learning all these names and conversion factors:
• Length: 1 mile = 1760 yards (let's skip furlongs and chains even though they are part of the derivation of the mile), 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 12 inches. Then there are industry-specific measures like mils in machining, points in typesetting, nautical miles.
• Volume: 1 US gallon = 4 quarts, 1 quart = 2 pints, 1 pint = 2 cups, 1 cup = 8 fluid ounces, 1 fluid ounce = 2 tablespoons, 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. Also, 1 US gallon = 231 cubic inches exact, surprisingly. Throw in some more industry-specific units like cubic feet of water, cubic inches of engine displacement, acre-feet of rain, cubic miles of dirt mined, barrels of oil...
• Mass: 1 short ton = 20 hundredweights, 1 hundredweight = 100 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces, 1 ounce = 480 grains; also, 1 stone = 14 pounds (pervasive in UK but nonexistent in US).
• Power: horsepower, BTU/h, ton of cooling, possibly foot-pound-per-second.
The point is, all of the above names and numbers are completely arbitrary and you have to learn them all from scratch. If you aced the test on units of length, that has told you exactly nothing about the units of mass.
It should go without saying in the metric system, the following series mean exactly what you think they mean:
• Length: ... nanometre, micrometre, millimetre, metre, kilometre, megametre, gigametre, ... .
• Volume: ... nanolitre, microlitre, millilitre, litre, kilolitre, megalitre, gigalitre, ... .
• Mass: ... nanogram, microgram, milligram, gram, kilogram, megagram (metric ton / tonne), gigagram, ... .
• Power: ... nanowatt, microwatt, milliwatt, watt, kilowatt, megawatt, gigawatt, ... .
• Frequency: ... nanohertz, microhertz, millhertz, hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, ... .
If you know how many metres are in a kilometre, you know how many hertz are in a kilohertz - you didn't need to learn anything new. You just needed to think for two seconds upon the first time you heard that prefixed unit.
An LED bulb advertised as 2000 lumens (lm) can be easily rewritten as 2 kilolumens (klm) if you wanted to. A power bank marketed as 20000 mA⋅h can at least be simplified to 20 A⋅h (and 72 kilocoulombs if you get rid of the hour).
For the record, I am from a metric country and immigrated to the US as an adult. I still find American system to be more adjusted to human needs. E.g. temperature in F does not need decimals unlike temperature in C, tool sizing in inches is simpler (look at the sets of drill bits in different systems for example), tire pressure in psi (e.g. one of my bikes is 53 psi rear and 51 front, or 3.65 and 3.51 bars, you could say I could remember just the decimals, but another bike is 33 and 31, or 2.27 and 2.13 so no, it's 3 digits with bars vs 2 in psi), house dimensions are in even number of feet so much easier to find furniture, which is designed with this in mind, obviously. Miles are great to estimate time of travel by car, take 1 minute per mile of distance on a highway and 2 minutes in the city and you will be pretty close.
But, of course, the reason the American system is never going away is because it would be insanely expensive: you either will have to rewrite all building codes/standars/recipes with stupid conversions e.g 50.8x101.6 instead of 2x4 even though the lumber dimensions are not really 2 and 4 inches or scrape them and write the new ones using the more sensible metric dimensions but then you will need to scrape all the tooling you had and buy new, metric tools. All so you could say how many micrometers in a kilometer and feel smart?
That might be true where you live, but it's hardly a universal constant. 1 minute per mile might be sort-of-universal for long distance Interstate driving, but then again, you can just as easily phrase that as ~1 hour per 100 km in metric.
I'm rather doubtful about your 2 minutes per mile (= 30 mph average speed) figure for "city" driving, though – how's that even possible when urban maximum speeds are usually in the 25 – 40 mph range, and that's not counting time lost for traffic lights and other intersections, general congestion and parking?
Checking a few destinations around where I live in Germany, non-Autobahn cross-country driving is closer to 2 minutes per mile rather than 1 minute per mile (and highly variable depending on your exact destination, so no point trying to estimate driving times to the nearest minute, anyway), and never mind actual urban driving.
I have not said it's a universal constant, it's true in the US, where we use miles. ~1 hour per 100km is not as easy.
I cannot say I care much if you are doubtful, especially if you live in Germany and not in the US, I doubt many people in the US will care about your doubts too.
I realized it would never catch on, because a 30 minute TV show would have to fit into 28.8 minutes, and the only way to do that was to lose a couple of commercials. Never gonna happen.
That's a scary ability. I wonder if that guy is equally adept at converting acre-feet to gallons, or if he's a one-trick pony.
Here's what I know without looking anything up: 1 mile = 1760 yards, 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 12 inches; 1 US gallon = 231 cubic inches (exact conversion, and a weird number at that). So 1 cubic mile = (63360 inch)^3 = 7707820032000/7 gal ≈ 1.101 trillion US gallons.
Fun fact, combustion engine displacements used to be quoted in cubic inches. Note that 61 in^3 ≈ 1 litre.
12 * 3 * 1760 = 12 * 5280 = 63,360
231
63360^3 / 231 = 1,101,117,147,428.571
Enjoy the warmth!
If you're working with small motors, the Ke (back-EMF constant) and Kt (torque constant) have different and crazy Reagan units (e.g. V/krpm, inch-ounces/A) but in SI they have units of V/(rd/s) and N-m/A, which if you crunch them down to kg, m, etc. are identical and so have the same numerical value (because they represent the same transformation from electric to mechanical or vice-versa). Power is the product of voltage and current or torque and speed - if you use the SI units no conversion required. Inertia was confusing as hell, some vendors specified it in MOISS, or milli-ounce-inches-seconds-squared, not only involving different unit but you can also get balled up in the mass vs force confusions.
Converting a drawing from one system to the other perfectly is practically impossible. Conversions can't always be exact and because tolerances are commonly specified in round numbers within a system.
In my garage I still have both metric and Reagan-unit tools. Even though my cars, even the American ones have been metric since the '80s, I have to have the other tools for other household things like the garage doors!
And then there's the tire size abomination - an unholy union - a 255R70-14 is 255 mm wide at the bulge, the sidewall height is 70% of that, and the rim diameter is 14 inches.
I agree that 1 °C is too big a step when dealing with thermostats but that's easily solved by using 0.5 °C resolution.
Nobody who grew up using the metric system feels it ‘cold’ and yearns for something with more character.
Except that Fahrenheit's extra precision doesn't really matter. Unless you can tell the difference between 72°F and 73°F, or 34°F and 33°F.
* (From my viewpoint as a millennial. Gen Z might think the golden years were during Obama, or just pre-COVID. To some extent every generation has a point in time that they see with rose tinted lenses.)
Of course they do. It's the formative years & youth. Roughly from the time you form a mature consciousness (12-14 yo) to roughly your late 20s or maybe early 30s when all your tastes, preferences etc. are formed.
The Trump reign is a direct consequence of 1980s Social and Economic policy.
Although the libertarian hellscape vision of the 1980s would reject state ownership of (for instance) Intel, it might embrace the Chevron ownership of the state.
Don't forget that connecting everyone to the internet was going to produce world peace, utopia, universal education and understanding. Instead of creating a conduit for memetic viruses to infect the world at unprecedented speed.
Childhood Zeitgeist is a perfect term for this. We all pine for it.
The worst is the hardware. I inherited a full assortment of #2-#10 stainless SAE UNC hardware from a business move (already in nice parts drawers, too). It was pretty awesome for just having whatever I needed on hand to build things. But now as I maintain more and more things that are metric native, I've been building up the assortment of metric threads as well.
I suspect this is one of the real pain points of fabricators (plus taps/dies). And I'm guessing they're still still Imperial native due to existing tooling, making the conversions not clean (it's easy to convert 1/2 inch to 12.7mm and measure that, but it's not straightforward to convert 10mm to 0.3937 inches (25.2/64ths) and measure that.
That said, I still use tons of decimal math because sometimes it is more useful, but not always.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ - the oil ran out and the post-war boom ended.
I wouldn't say that. But the memes about 1971 are striking.
>> I wonder if you also believe wealth is a zero-sum proposal
I don't know where that comes from. Pretty clearly it's not. Building stuff that multiplies labor productivity produces more wealth for everyone.
I think the issue in 1971 wasn't the end of the gold standard per se, but the end of the post-war reconstruction boom, the end of cheap oil subsidizing literally everything, and what I didn't mention in my original comment but it also highly relevant is the drastic lowering of top tax rates.
Wealth isn't zero-sum, but dividing up the share of the newly created wealth is. The more of it that goes to capital instead of labor, the more of that share of productivity growth is captured by the rich instead of the workers, who end up not sharing in the broader prosperity of society.
RWR and the charismatic traditionalism he espoused have caused a great deal of harm to American society.
Metrication is not at the top of that list, but it is one of many examples that we still live with today.
NASA did this using customary units
>I've been missing it my entire life since
Surely you've learned by now that you're missing childhood, not an actual thing about the US? I'm asking this as someone who does think this era was peak Americana, but for totally different reasons than you present, and having not been alive then myself.
The Apollo Guidance Computer performed all internal calculations in SI units, and only converted to US customary units for display:
https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/...
I share some of the same disappointment, especially going back and noticing disinvestment in the schools, which were one of the gems of the area.
(And then of course Prop 13 came along and impaled California.)
1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like.
2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there are awkward numbers baked into the system. e.g. 5280 feet in a mile. 128 ounces in a gallon.
3. "It's too much trouble to change." You're already using metric units. U.S. customary units have, metrologically, been defined in terms of metric units since the Mendenhall order of 1893[1]. i.e. A meter is defined in terms of how far light can travel in a period of time defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium. If you needed to know exactly how long a meter is for a very precise measurement, a reference meter could be produced in a lab by aliens who have no idea what a meter is by using this definition. No such definition exists for a foot or yard. Nobody maintains physical reference yards (the old-school method) anymore. If you want those aliens to measure out a yard precisely, you tell them how to measure out a meter and then tell them 1 yard = 0.9144 m.
No we aren't. It doesn't matter what the units are defined as, that is not what determines which units we are using.
They only case in daily practice where 1°C is too large is the difference between normal body temperature (36.5°C) and mild fever (37.0°C), but thermometers have to be graduated in much smaller subdivisions anyway.
Yeah, it's noticeable. That 0.5C move is roughly a 1F move. And there's definitely a noticeable difference between 71F, 72F, and 73F.
But I'd say that it ultimately only matters in human comfort and only when you are talking about room temps. Once you get outside that 70->75 range the exactness starts mattering a lot less. 80 and 85 both feel hot. 65 and 60 both feel cold.
I prefer Fahrenheit because it's based around the human, but it really doesn't matter, and it's probably better long term to have measurements that are not based around the human condition, but we're talking about benefits to society tens of thousands of years from now, rather than today.
Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.
You can ultimately also average out temperatures for multiple horses to get pretty close to that 100F.
A better pin would have been something like the melting point of Gallium. Something that hardly changes with a change of pressure.
I mean, every unit is arbiturary. But we need to pick something.
I don't have any love for either, but F is the easiest to pick fun at when none of the standard temperatures make any sense. 32 for freezing water, 212 for boiing, 98.6 for human temperature? The 0 and 100 scale were based on the freezing point of some particular saltwater mixture and 90 degrees for human body temperature (which was corrected and then the scale updated to get to the modern temperature).
As you can imagine, it was harder to obtain pure water and back then they noticed water freezing at various temperatures.
None of those attributes matter much. F is great for talking about the weather in the US, where 0 to 100 is approximately the experienced range through the year. You don't need to know the exact boiling or freezing points of water to know how cold or hot you'll be each day.
The inch-foot-yard-mile scale are not uniform, and not easy to calculate. Their only convenience is easy divisibility by 3. The practical example of uniform scale of this kind is seconds-minutes-hours, which, I suppose, go all the way down to the Sumerian 60-based scale. The mm-cm-m-km are much easier in practice.
Sub-inch units are an honest binary system, and as such is pretty practical. The fact that it's written as a ratio of decimal numbers is sometimes unhelpful though, comparing 7/16" and 1/2" takes either mental gymnastics or memorization. Millimeters are somehow more convenient here, but not by such a large margin as with inch-foot-yard scale.
The Fahrenheit scale is uselessly arbitrary; 0°F does not match anything useful, and 100°F is not that useful either.
The only mile that makes sense is the nautical mile, 1 nm matches 1" of arc on the map / globe, the same way as 1 km is 1/40,000th of the arc.
But it isn't a good reason all by itself.
The biggest problem I have is I don't see either as inherently better, both are relative scales defined by easy to setup but completely arbitrary measures that lacks any real relevance to modern life. We could of defined or scaled our thermometers based on the boiling and freezing points of mercury and nothing would really change, just shifting some numbers around and then still making another absolute scale that can actually be used for any sort of decent thermal calculations.
The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters.
Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats.
They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile".
Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.
Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally experience 5 degrees F - 100 degrees F at different points of the year. That's 95 degrees of precision with no decimal. In C, that's -15 to 37.8, a mere 52.8 degrees. The difference between 75 (usually a beautiful day) and 85 (hot) is 23.8C to 29.4C. Everything packed into this tight range.
Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
For science, sure, I'll use metric.
Unless you're doing some kind of scientific calculaton there's no need to think about decimals of celsius at all. Just like Fahrenheit users surely don't care whether it's 50 or 53 or whatever. It's around 50, that's all you need to know.
But if it was closer to freezing say 42°F =5.556 °C (again) so 5°C. So arbitrarily we could say 57°F was 12°C =53.6 °F actually.
But a true Canuck knows knowing the temp is barely half the battle, what’s the wind speed and humidity? 29°C can be a lovely day if it’s dry or completely unbearable if it’s humid.
We hardly ever use decimals for weather-related measurements, the other factors above being more relevant.
Contrast that with measurements where I would say if you need to know a precise one you should be using decimal; ie what do you do if it doesn’t precisely third or fourth? If you’re talking about tool sizes then any system works as long as your froodle matches the grommlet.
C * 2 + 30 = ~F
(F - 32) / 1.8 = C
C * 1.8 + 32 = F
I personally find the math just as easy to do accurately. For example, 87F -32/1.8 = 55/1.8 =~30.5C. Compare that to your approximate method, which would give 28.5C, which is just wrong
(Maybe I just got really good at this when working a public facing job with a lot of American tourists - they would ask what our celsius temperatures were "in real units", so I got quite comfortable converting the air and water temps. Fahrenheit never once became intuitive to me, though.)
E.g., to convert 31℃ to ℉: 31 x 2 = 62. Subtract 6.2 = 55.8. Add 32 = 87.8℉.
If you want to round the result to the nearest integer the subtract 10% step is a convenient place: 31 x 2 = 62. Subtract 6 (rounded 6.2) = 56. Add 32 = 88℉.
When going the other way and dividing, I similarly find it mentally easier to multiply by 10/18 (rather than just divide by 1.8)
(C + 40) * 9/5 - 40 = F
Takes advantage of the fact that -40 F and -40 C are the same.
Remember it as (move origin -- convert -- move origin back).
I find it easier as a I don't have to remember precedence rules and the multiplication is obvious.
AS someone that grew up with metric that feels fairly natural and not tight at all?
>Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
I used ruler tapes with both metric and imperial on either side and i always wondered how one could use the inches since they're so big and didn't always have the same minute subdivisions. Also doing my math in decimals seemed easier than calculating with quarter or 1/8th inches or smaller.
>For science, sure, I'll use metric.
Surely it would feel more natural to use the same for everything and all measurements.
I want to know how much rainwater my IBC roughly holds. I take out my measuring tape real quick. I'm not even sure how I'd get started in imperial without some strong intuition build up over years?
Really all there is to that discussion.
Your tape measure didn't have 1/3, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 subdivisions? Sounds like a bad tape measure (or really just one where US Customary was an afterthought).
As for science, well, most people don't do it. Those that do can use different things in different contexts, it's not that hard.
I think one of em did and the other didn't. Either way it seems far more difficult to do some math with.
That's really just because you're used to it. The rest is rationalization...
OTH of course the rest of the world can hardly complain since we didn't switch time or (angle-)degrees to decimal either ;)
So long as we live on earth, metric time won't make much sense.
That would have no impact on decimalizing sub-day units: 10 decidays in a day, 2 millidays to cook an egg... But no country did it, which speaks to the power our time traditions really hold in our psyche.
part of it is natural. We roughly divide day and night into 2 parts, so we already need to have considerations for halves.
It seems like base 12 was chosen simply due to religion. the zodiac defined the hours at night for ancient egypt, and the Goddesses of Seasons for Greece later on.
Minutes and seconds came because we let astronomers define them based on hours and movements of the sun along a dial. The time it'd take for a dial to traverse a literal arcminute and arcsecond (which is still a thing today). Though these times are very different from today's minutes and seconds. So we have math to thank for the base 60 measurements.
I forget which country did it but their historical time system counts hours as two halves from sunrise and then from sunset... That sounds a lot better than noon and midnight, to me. We could totally do
sunrise = 0.00
sunset = 9.99 -> 10.00
sunrise = 19.99 -> 0.00
The problem was that it messed with the week, having a "day of worship / rest" every 7 days, which was then every 10 days
And I just poke my nose out the window and look outside to see what the temperature is
Freezing.... ~30°F.... ~0°C
Need coat... ~50°F... ~10°C
T-shirt..... ~70°F... ~20°C
Melting..... ~90°F... ~30°C
ps HN tables are not really a thing, are they?
pps Suspiciously many experiments are conducted at 293K
So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures.
If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees you could go higher resolution and it'd be fine because rounding would occur like we do with vehicle speeds. Or we could go lower resolution and just make the degrees bigger, which is basically what celsius is.
Kelvin is actually the most practical of the lot, FSVO [1]. It's not a 'degree', because it's anchored at absolute zero. It's just a bit unwieldy for our day-to-day, with room temperature at 293K. But I can imagine if people were to grow up with it, it wouldn't be too bad even then.
[1] eg. "Why can an aircon still heat the house at ten degrees below zero?"- "Well akshually, you still have 263K of heat energy to pump, not an actual problem"
In the US, you buy measuring spoons that have specific sizes (1tbsp is 1/2oz, and 1tsp is 1/3tbsp).
On a sidenote: an ounce is 100g here and a pound 500g. Mainly by being in common usage and translated to common used weights. "An ounce more okay?" is an easy way to sell more without mentioning how much it actually is in numbers.
1 US cup is 2.37dL.
Otherwise, a metric tablespoon is 15mL and a teaspoon is 5mL.
(EDIT: Also fwiw I often use a spoon or whatever to scoop things into the bowl, vs. pouring, which means I have more control but can still offload the measuring part to the scale...)
Whatever gets the delicious baked goods in your mouth I guess
I wonder if there's a place on the internet where I can find more of this sort of seemingly strong and well-thought out arguments for something that is so clearly subjective (if not just inferior).
Any platform where snooty articulate people congregate will have such arguments by the bushel.
Well played
0°C.................100°C
Cold Dead
0°F.................100°F
Really Cold Really Hotif "room temperature" was smack in the middle, at 50 degF, you might have a point.
but no, it's pure post-hoc rationalization.
being naked at 0 degF will kill you. being naked at 100 degF will (usually) not. they're not remotely equivalent.
instead, think of it this way - human beings are mostly water, and 0 to 100 degC is "percentage of the way from water's freezing point to boiling point".
room temperature is "about 20% of the way to boiling". 40% or higher starts to cause our bodies to overheat. a typical sauna will be somewhere between 50 and 70% of the way.
0K..................100K
Dead Still Deadthis for me is the real appeal of metric, not that somehow a meter is magical, but at least there is one system, with a consistent set of rules, that allows us to do some magic things like tell the approximate volume of water given a weight.
edit: omg I forgot about nominal wood sizes. the underlying system actually has different units based on the material and the usage. copper gauge is not the same as steel gauge. thats pretty hopeless. for precious metals we also have the pennyweight
With you on temperature though.
https://surveysupplyinc.com/lufkin-12-foot-hi-viz-engineers-...
If you take a look at American grocery stores, you'll see things like: “40 × 16.9 FL OZ (1.05 PT) 500 mL BOTTLES / NET 676 FL OZ (5.28 GAL) 20 L” https://www.instacart.com/assets/domains/product-image/file/...
To dissect that product: It's a pack of 40× 500 mL of bottled water. I have zero problems with the metric labeling. But for the US customary units, you can see a jumble: decimal fluid ounces, decimal pints, a large number of fluid ounces, and decimal gallons. Note that the gallons can be broken down into mixed units (and some packaging does that); 676 fl oz = 5 gal 1 qt (0 pt) (0 cup) 4 fl oz exactly. The US units are basically "whatever I feel like using" (don't forget tsp and tbsp, which aren't used in the current example). The metric units for liquid consumer products are always mL and L, which greatly simplifies learning and comparison for the consumer.
Survey foot or international foot?
They might have measured precisely at the weather station, but local variation in temperature makes that extra precision meaningless unless you are located exactly where the measurement happened.
Even in a climate controlled room, there will be a degree or two of variation between different parts of the room.
that extra decimal point gives people false confidence about the measurement being more precise than it is.
because so much science (even in the US) happens using the metric system, the actual measured average [0] is 37 degC, and 37.0 degC == 98.6 degF. the nuance of the average being more of a confidence interval (37 +/- 0.5 degC, possibly larger) gets lost as well.
The results from this recipe were never consistent when I used volume measurements. I converted to mass in metric and now I get consistent results.
adapted from: [https://www.justsotasty.com/wprm_print/11594](https://www.justsotasty.com/wprm_print/11594)
Banana Brownies
Prep Time: 15 minutes mins
Cook Time: 35 minutes mins
Total Time: 50 minutes mins
### Equipment
- 9x13 inch (23 x 33 cm) baking pan*
### Ingredients
- 227 g unsalted butter (2 US sticks) unsalted butter (The better the butter, the better the results. In the U.S. market, Kerrygold yields the best results, followed by Cabot, and "well, it's still brownies" Market Basket house brand.) - 400 g dark brown sugar - 2 large eggs - 5-10 ml vanilla extract - 150 g mashed bananas (about 2-3 large, brown bananas) - 156 g all-purpose flour (I prefer King Arthur All Purpose Unbleached Flour) - 60-70 g cocoa powder - 2-3g teaspoon salt - 280(ish) g chocolate chips (I prefer Ghirardelli Bittersweet 60% Cacao Baking Chips, use 1 bag) )
### Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350F degrees (180C or 170C fan forced). Line a 9x13 inch (23x33 cm) pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil leaving an overhang around the sides. Alternatively, lightly grease the pan. - Melt the butter in a double boiler. Add in the brown sugar, stir, and let it sit in the double boiler, stirring occasionally until the mixture has a nice caramelly flavor. - While the butter-sugar mixture is cooking in the double boiler, combine the dry ingredients. - Sometimes cocoa powder is lumpy, and you may need to sift it. The alternative I use is combined flour, cocoa powder, and salt, and use a whisk to mix it all together and break up any lumps if there are any. - Take the brown sugar butter mixture off of the double boiler and mix in the mashed bananas and vanilla. - The bananas usually cool the mixture enough that the eggs won't cook when you put them in, but if the mixture is hot, add some flour, add some of the dry ingredients, and that will cool it down enough to add the eggs safely. - Stir in the chocolate chips. - Pour/spoon the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 35 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean or with a few damp crumbs. - Cool fully (about 4 hours), then slice. Store brownies in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 4 days. (Never last that long in my house)
[edit: speech recognition error correction.]
Otherwise, if you use a vessel with markings for various volumes, you waste a lot of time to ensure that the quantity in the vessel lines precisely to a marking and its surface is perfectly level, in comparison with weighing the same ingredient. Moreover, you have one more vessel to wash.
I eat only food that I cook myself and I use only 2 kinds of volume measurements. I use a set of volumetric spoons for measuring various kinds of powders used in small quantities, e.g. salt and spices. I also use a graded beaker for water. For any other ingredients, it is much faster to put the vessel in which they will be cooked on digital weighing scales, and pour there each ingredient until the right weight is reached. Besides being faster, this also avoids the need to use additional vessels, which would need washing. The graded beaker is better for water only because it must be taken from the tap, where I cannot put the weighing scales.
For example, this includes making bread, when I pour water in a bowl that will be used for kneading with a graded beaker, then I pour the flour while weighing until the desired weight is reached, then salt is added with a small volumetric spoon.
If you convert a nice, round number from one system to the other, you'll end up with a more precise, less nice number, which will give the impression that Celsius is harder to use.
In reality, people from metric countries just think in 5-degree increments: 25 is a beautiful day, 30 is hot. It doesn't feel any harder to read than Fahrenheit.
I wonder if there are people that moved to the U.S., switched to Fahrenheit and now find it more intuitive than Celsius. If one is easier than the other, I assume it still doesn't make up for the hurdle of learning a new system.
I've done the move twice in each direction. Neither is more intuitive.
When I moved back to C after 22 years in F, I had to adjust again. It took a few months. The other times were after fewer years, but still took (re)adjusting.
I worked as an engineer and the only drawings specified in imperial were pre 1970s and all the CNC controls are programed in mm feed rates in mm/rev or mm/min
all of the math normal people use in everyday life happens in base 10.
"it's easy because it's base 12" is an absolutely ludicrous idea.
what's 7'5" divided by 3? divided by 4?
what happens if you need to divide by 5?
and sure, there are various mental math tricks you can learn to make this easier...or you could just use the metric system.
7'5" is 226cm. that's a normal, boring, everyday, base 10 integer.
you don't need to learn a special set of "mental math for base 12" tricks. instead you can re-use the same mental math tricks you use for every other base 10 number.
only because that is what you are accustomed to
because I grew up with metric, m/cm are much more convenient for daily use
I will allow that a "foot" is useful as an approximate intermediary unit between m and cm
> Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
again only because the US construction industry grew up using fractions instead of decimals
Below 10 deg C - it is cold, Heavy jacket weather
10-15 Typical winter weather (at least where I live) light jacket
15-20 Spring/Autumn weather long sleeves no jacket required
20-25 Pleasant day T-shirt weather
25-30 Getting hot, ceiling fans/AC time
30-35 Hot
35+ very Hot
Meanwhile, I'm fine at 98.6 degrees, but everyone freaks out over 100 degrees. it's a more precise unit, right?
feet/inches make more sense to be attached to. they are based on your body parts (roughly), and we spend a lot of time looking at humans. inches divide our fingers, feet are... well, feet. And yards are steps. We intuitively know what all those feel like through everyday life compared to the scientific way we derive a centimeter. inches and feet being base 12 is more a coincidence than anything else (or maybe not. Maybe there's some golden ratio shenanigans at play).
For those wondering why there is this distinction, the British Imperial units were created by the Weights and Measures Act 1824; US customary units follow the Winchester Standard of 1588.
Road signs are still in miles.
We also use Pints in pubs, which are a different size to US pints.
That said, I exclusively drink pints in pubs.
And so we should.
A British pint is 568 ml. We will switch to smaller metric 500 ml 'half-litre' beers over my dead body.
All other imperial measurements can bugger off to the history books where they rightly belong.
If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would adapt within a year or two, but we need to wait at least 3 years for that to even begin to become a possibility again.
I guess you imagine we’ll all be calling half inch pipe twelve seven after this year adjustment period?
I guess people do it with bullet calibers.
Weights are even easier as pretty much everyone uses grams as the smallest daily unit and most people can convert to and from metric on the fly for ounces, lbs, kgs. Liters aren't uncommon, and ml<->gram equivalence for water is well-known. Traditional kitchen volumes probably wouldn't be displaced because metric has no answer for those in first place.
Temperature is where metric will fail to gain adoption because Celsius totally sucks unless your daily life consists only of boiling or freezing water at sea level. No advantages over Fahrenheit except maybe arguably for science, because it's Kelvin with an offset.
Perhaps as a compromise we could adopt the meter but divide it by halves, quarters, and so on. Binary fractions are so much more universal than arbitrary base ten ;)
That's only mildly sarcastic. For many people, it's become a part of being American, especially on the conservative side of the isle. Now, I personally live in celsius and work comfortably in kilometers, liters, and grams. However, it has become a weird point of pride for some Americans.
Since we humans operate 99% of our existence in a narrow band between 0 and 100 degrees celzius, I'd say its more important than starting from absolute 0 and dealing constantly with big offsets.
0 or 100 or -100 or 10 Fahrenheit is what? From Gemini: "0°F was the lowest temperature achievable with a mixture of ice, water, and salt (brine), while 96°F was set as the approximate temperature of the human body (blood heat), chosen because 96 is easily divisible by many numbers, allowing for finer divisions" - rather insignificant things.
Oddly enough if any government could just push and shove this through it might be Trump. I bet 20 years later you'd have a sizeable constituency who could be convinced that the change from imperial to foreign units was the beginning of the fall and decline and that everything could be fixed if you went back.
Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.
I have a socket set in half-millimeter sizes for the absolute plague of cheap bolts and nuts that are being manufactured with obscene levels of slop.
The guy buying the widgets doesn't care because he's expecting a widget that's plus or minus dozens of the unit the machine is being set to. The setting is just as precise as it is in order to set the fat part of your output curve over the middle of your quality control pass range.
The machine might not even be calibrated in a direct measurement, it might be calibrated in a secondary measurement. Like tons of force or rpm or cycle speed or something that then translates to the dimension of your output part.
The units on machines mostly only exist for calibration. Beyond that they can just be made up "my amp goes to 11" type scales because they're so divorced from the outputs, either in precision (or are literally indirect as described above) that you "just have to know" that if you want a "X<unit>" widget you'll actually set the machine
Tons and tons and tons of stuff in our world is even intentionally spec'd out in this manner. A 14" tire rim is not 14, there's a tolerance. A 3" pipe isn't 3". These are all just nominal sizes. Just about everything in our world is nominally sized. A nut and bolt manufacturer doesn't care whether they're making 12mm or 1/2 on a given day. Those are just nominal sizes, arbitrary names, in their minds. It doesn't matter whether the factory runs on metric or imperial or something else because they're just shooting for an arbitrary number.
The only time your unit really matters is when interfacing with other parties and it only matters insofar as you need to know what each other are uses.
There are many more fun and exciting non-metric measurements you might encounter than plain old fractional inches.
A fabricator might encounter sheet metal thickness in "gauge". Wire sizes, ammunition, and machine screws also come in "gauge" sizes but all four are different scales. US drills come not only in fractional inch sizes, but letters and numbers as well. Furnace efficiency is often specified in percent, but air conditioner efficiency comes in SEER. Water softener capacity is in "grains". Pipe threads come in "inch sizes", but that usually means NPT. Metal hardness and rubber durometer measurements have their own scale which doesn't really belong to either camp.
To be fair, a lot of these are categorical units. Screws come in #2 or #6 or #4, but you'll never need to worry about #3.7.
A wise professor once told me "All these different units will not be going away within your lifetime, so you better get used to working with them."
or 0000. Which then can conveniently be abbreviated to 4/0.
There are quite a few ways to measure the hardness the most interesting being Vickers. You plunge a diamond of a known force into a surface and measure the size of the indentation. This is surprisingly accurate but does leave a small diamond mark on your surface.
With a sufficiently small part a blacksmith or other folks can determine the hardness of a steel just by listening to how it rings. Hey, you can also test for cracks with a ring test, the most common use is ring-testing a vitrified grinding wheel to see if there is no crack
Alot of engineering is just listen and maybe the odd hit with a hammer
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/pirates-caribbean-...
In ordinary every day life, I've found that I use metric for measurements under an inch or under an ounce. At a certain upper limit it makes more sense to use metric for large values too.
So I have to suffer with the magic constant 25.4 bouncing around my brain every day forever and constantly converting trivial measurements into worse units.
I will never convert a measurement to fractional inches. If you must have inches as an input you can suffer a damn decimal point.
Similarly, a 1/4-20 bolt will fit in a M6 tapped hole if you use a large enough hammer.
A hazardous aspect of US threadforms is that #10-32 machine screws and #8-32 machine screws have the same pitch. So you can fit #8 bolts in a #10 hole and sometimes, they FEEL like they made good torque, because they engaged one side of the tapped hole, when they really have no tension capability whatsoever.
Reference the British Airways flight 5390 accident where the pilot got sucked 3/4 the way out the cockpit window and slammed against the side of the fuselage while a flight attendant clung to his feet and the co-pilot safely landed.
Also note that a British designed and built product was using US threadforms...
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-near-crash-of-britis...
That incident led to a major change in how aircraft windows were designed. Instead of being fitted from the outside they were changed to being fitted from the inside.
When fitted from the outside the job of the fasteners is to keep the cabin pressure from blowing the window out when the plane is high up and the outside pressure is low. When the plane is on the ground gravity will keep the window in place and the fastener isn't doing much.
Botch installing the fasteners and you don't find out about until the window blows out at high altitude, like on that flight.
When fitted from the inside the job of the fasteners is to keep the window from falling in due to gravity when the plane is on the ground or at low altitude. At higher altitudes the cabin pressure pushes the window firmly into the frame and the fasteners aren't doing much.
Botch installing the fasteners and the window falls in on the ground or at low altitude which is a lot easier to deal with then a window blowing out at high altitude.
When I was designing stuff here in Canada, that was basically Wednesday. One big advantage of the USA withdrawing from trade is that Canada will have the opportunity to finally complete the metric conversion.
People sometimes ask "what's heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?", the implication is that you're stupid for for asking a dumb question. The technically correct answer is that the pound of feathers is heavier. The expected answer is usually that they're the same weight, because there is no difference in weight between the two things that both weigh a pound. The problem is that, in the USA, a pound of feathers is measured with the avoirdupois pound, while a pound of gold is measured in troy pounds. The troy pound is lighter than the avoirdupois pound, so the answer is that a pound of feathers is heavier.
While a troy ounce is heavier than the avoirdupois ounce, and the grain unit is equal in both. So, depending on whether you ask for a pound/ounce/grain, the answer can change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight
Or are they more like t-shirt sizes "I know I want a 16oz can to drink and I know how big they are"?
It seems the exception is that wine imported into the US can keep metric-only labeling, so I have indeed seen bottles labeled only "750 mL", sold in the US.
Some soda bottles. 20 oz bottles are still very much the norm at convenience stores, and 12 oz cans are the norm when you buy 12-packs.
For example my breakfast cereal label says a serving is 1 cup or 45g.
Liquids seem to give a US customary volume and a metric volume. For example the milk I put on that cereal says a serving is 1 cup or 240mL.
Checking some sauces I have on hand thick liquids (ketchup and sriracha) are US volume and metric mass like pourable solids and thin liquids (like soy sauce) are both US and metric volume like milk.
Butter is also US volume and metric mass.
A little bit of research says that this is actually regulatory. For things where how much you can fit in a given volume varies quite a bit depending on how you pack it the FDA requires that the metric units on the label be mass units, and that nutritional information is for that amount of mass of the thing.
The actual amount of flour in a cup of flour for example can vary quite a bit depending on how much air got in when you poured it. If the label says it is 110 calories for 1/4 cup (30g) and you want to actually use 440 calories of flour in something you should measure out 120g rather than 1 cup.
For things like milk 1 cup is going to have the same amount of milk no matter how you pour it, so they use volume measurement for both customary and metric.
This is sadly far from the truth. Manufacturing is nowhere near metric conversion. Horsepower, foot-pounds, and my all time least favorite unit, the mil, are everywhere. And relatedly, manufacturing execution systems that use localtime internally cause all manner of hilarity twice a year. It’s like we’re just deliberately trying to be bad at measuring things.
Woodworking became a lot more enjoyable- I don't know why- when I started to think "I need to shave off 1mm" instead of "shave off 3/64 inch" or whatever.
Every time the USA manufacturers something that isn't metric, you've made it incompatible with the rest of the world. The USA got away with that when I was young because they were the world manufacturing powerhouse. Now, those powerhouses are based on Asia. They define the units most of the world sees, and they use metric. So if I buy a Chinese mower, all the bolts are metric and I'm guaranteed the local hardware store stocks them.
Time has moved on, the USA is now a follower, not a leader in most things bar digital services. If they want to return to selling those things to the world the speeds have to be in km/hr, weights in kg, sizes in mm or meters, the temperature in Celcius, pressures in Pascal's.
Also a great use for LLMs. I'll tell it to convert recipes from volume to grams by estimating density. It's surprisingly accurate
96% of the world’s population and 75% of its nominal (but not PPP adjusted!) GDP is metric.
All science is metric.
Other arguments simply don’t matter. How fine the Fahrenheit vs Celsius scales are or whatever is pointless, irrelevant debate.
Join the rest of us, or slowly fade into irrelevance. There is no third option.
You’re that one mansion with the doddering old cranky fool still lighting their place with town gas while everyone else has been using electric lighting for decades.
The next time the street is dug up, your pipes won’t be reconnected.
“So what if our spaceships occasionally crash into Mars at full speed because we got mixed up with our units… again? We can afford it!” — apologists.
I noticed a couple of years back that my "U.S. Customary" wrenches weren't fitting my new plumbing fittings which were definitely not metric, but metric wrenches did. Probably made in China.
Then last summer I noticed something similar with lag bolts. The U.S. Customary socket fit the head, but it was nearly identical to a metric one that fit just a little better. The threads are designed to go into wood, not a nut, so if they were metric you'd never even know.
- what's half of 1-7/8"
Metric: half of 44mm is 22mm. half of 45mm is 23mm [1]. half of 46mm is 23mm. Trivial
- which one is bigger 5/16" or 3/8"
Metric: 9mm is obviously bigger than 8mm.
Fractions are just unnecessarily complicated.
[1] Millimeters are small enough that you'll never need to go below that except in specialties like machining.
https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/how-kilometers-appeare...
And every science class I've ever had was exclusively SI units. Except for Thermodynamics, which sometimes uses BTUs and steam engines.
There is no super-slow "conversion" of the US to metric.
There is a super-slow adoption of metric _alongside_ the "customary" Imperial system.
There are many reasons I can find for leaving the US, but engaging in DIY projects utilizing local suppliers are what's come closest to pushing me over the edge. Especially in this post-SEARS hellscape of low quality made in china junk the market's flooded with. Now not only can I never find the fasteners I need, the tools suck too!
I'd always waste my time going to Home Depot etc and getting aggravated at their metric fastener selections.
Unless someone comes along and forces it on you, for the average person, there’s not enough incentive to switch.
The other part, which I'm sympathetic to, is that for human scale everyday things, Fahrenheit 0 degrees lines up with really darned cold, 100 degrees with really hot outside of an oven, and the degree size is about twice as granular as Celsius.
And while Celsius degree size is indeed widely used in engineering calculations, you're often using Kelvin as the absolute temperature scale. (Which does use Celsius degree increments of course.)
And then they'll argue that the inch is more convenient than the centimeter because it's twice as large.
That's backwards. Fractions of an inch are in far more common usage than fractions of a centigrade. Ideal might be both a smaller inch and a smaller centigrade, but between the two a smaller inch is more helpful than a smaller centigrade.
its a small advantage, but I think zero indicating when things might freeze is a more useful than "0 degrees lines up with really darned cold"
> zero indicating when things might freeze is useful
Of course it is, parent is being silly.
Picking some other non-zero random number for freezing just seems absurd to me. But that's because Centigrade is what I am familiar with.
Say pick freezing = 12, or 47?. If those numbers for freezing seem absurd to you, then consider that the only advantage that "32" has for you is that you're familiar with it. People will find reasons to defend whichever one they grew up with.
Obviously both can be adapted to. But if you took a group of aliens and asked them to come up with a temperature scale that was only used to convey how cold or warm the temperature felt to humans, they would almost certainly use human body temperature in their design process not the freezing and boiling points of water.
This isn’t to say that Celsius isn’t perfectly fine and superior in most ways. I’m not insulting anyone or attempting to participate in some kind of culture war.
Celsius is obviously a better scale for determining when water freezes. But I’ve never found myself paying attention to that. Mostly because any problems that I’d worry about related to the water freezing happen well below freezing.
But if you find yourself unable to agree that one system has some inherent advantages over another, even if they don’t outweigh the disadvantages, you should step back and think a little more objectively.
This is completely nonsensical. I draw the exact opposite conclusion regarding what some "logical" aliens from planet Vulcan would choose.
> generally falls between -17 and 37.
What are you even talking about? -17 is a complete irrelevance to me, it does not happen, and I often deal with water or objects over 37c. Those are parochial numbers.
Your conclusion is predicated on finding reasons to defend what you're familiar with. There is no objectivity to it. Nor can there be.
> What are you even talking about? -17 is a complete irrelevance to me, it does not happen,
It lines up with 0F, which in most of the US is about as cold as it gets. You could be more specific and lick the weight 95% percentile coldest yearly low and get -19 or -16 or something. The specific number is irrelevant. The point is that a scale where the daily values generally fall between 0 and 100 is something that most people would admit is a point in that scale’s favor.
That doesn’t mean that Fahrenheit is better than Celsius. It does mean that there are objective advantages to it for some purposes.
If you can’t sit down and analyze Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin and make a list of pros and cons for each, you’re just being stubborn.
"most of the US" . And yet you think that a group of aliens looking at planet Earth would anchor on that region. This makes no sense. It is what I meant by "parochial".
> The specific number is irrelevant.
Lets set the zero point to an irrelevant number, it's be great!
> does mean that there are objective advantages to it for some purposes.
Sure, I agree. In some places.
> If you can’t sit down and analyze
I can. But if you don't know better than to avoid focussing on that, you're missing the mere familiarity that was emphasised repeatedly.
Then imagine a group of Aliens is building a scale for the United States of America, which in context is the only relevant country since this entire discussion is about the US switching to Celsius. It doesn’t actually have to be aliens. Just a neutral party with no bias towards an existing scale.
> I can. But if you don't know better than to avoid focussing on that, you're missing the mere familiarity that was emphasised repeatedly.
Familiarity is obviously the reason that the US is a metric holdout. No one has ever argued otherwise.
The only point I am making in this entire forsaken thread is that for the very specific purpose of air temperature in the United States, F has a nice advantage to C in that the numbers normally line up 0 to 100 and that all other things being equal humans find scales from 0-100 pleasant.
Multiple People in this thread who have no familiarity with Fahrenheit have agreed with this.
Because it is slightly nicer scale in this specific place for this specific purpose, no one is going to voluntarily switch the way that some people voluntarily switch to grams when baking or mm when working with small objects.
Rubbish. Absolute nonsense. It's very useful.
But, each system has points where you can say that it is more convenient . You could defend Fahrenheit all day. I could counter with Celsius usefulness. "below zero" being a synonym for "below freezing" is one of those.
But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
Of course it does. That’s my entire point. For the intended purpose of measuring air temperature there are some advantages to Fahrenheit. Celsius is not self evidently superior in that regard. Therefore no one using Fahrenheit is going to change unless forced.
The freezing point of water is useful for some things, but I’ve never paid particular attention to 32F because almost all of the bad things I need to worry about related to freezing water happen much lower than that.
So making 32F the 0 point of the scale has few objective benefits to me.
Well, that's you, it's not me. 0F is a completely useless benchmark where I am, it never happens. And someone north of you will want a lower point. This is all parochial.
But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
What I’m saying is that a scale where most most values on most days fall between 0-100 is objectively better than a scale where they fall between -17 and 37.
There are only 2 states in the country where the average winter lows are below 0 and they have tiny populations. So 0 isn’t set at a perfect temperature for the purpose of air temperature in the US, but it’s not too far off from it.
> But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
I didn’t grow up using metric, but I use grams for baking and generally use mm for designing things. Despite the difficulties (most recipes in the US aren’t metric).
And there are several people in this thread who report that they grew up with Celsius and have never used Fahrenheit, but they agree that for air temperature it’s a nice scale.
Someone from the tropics might say 8°F is really darned cold, or 15°F, or whatever.
And choice of 0/100 for weather is absolutely baseless. You do have below-zero days and in some places it can be over 100. With Celsius you know when it’s going to be ice on the roads and when rain becomes snow.
For someone like me living in a country with the metric system there's no issues with negative values for the temperature. It just mean it's below freezing, which is cold, the more below freezing it is, the colder it is. And inversely the more above freezing it is, the hotter it is. For me 20C feels good, 30C is too hot, 40C is at the point where I can't work anymore, and anything above that doesn't exist around here. 100C is where water is boiling at sea level. Easy.
Another thing that's interesting to me is that going from 300m to 0.3km is automatic, it maps to exactly the same concept to me in my mind, I don't feel like I'm doing any conversion at all and one is not harder to use than the other.
And that's only length. It gets worse outside of length. Like WTF is an ounce?
And then there's the hundredweight, where "hundred" actually means "eight"...
0 degrees C is a cold winter day, 100 degrees C means you're dead
I think he's suggesting that a 0-100 scale for temperature/"relative warmth outside" is more intuitive than a 0-37 scale. It's easier to to place 73 degrees on a 0-100 relative warmth scale than it is to place 18 degrees on a 0-37 scale (unless of course you grew up calibrated to the 0-37 scale and know that 18degrees means you maybe need a light jacket or whatever).
I think it's funny that one of the main benefits of metric is its base-10-ness where things scale so nicely from 1-10-100-1000 etc. but then for temperature we're supposed to be fine with a 0-37? Fahrenheit is basically the 1-100 version of temperature (when it comes to weather).
Not for engineering though!!! Being able to add 1/64 and 5/16 and 17/32 etc. in your head without stumbling is a skill that I did not acquire.
Don't agree on the Fahrenheit though and for the same reason! Degrees are just the right scale, and besides, anchored at freezing (0) and typical boiling (100) points. But that's just habits. Probably if I'd grown up with Fahrenheit, I'd prefer it too. And besides the oven defaulted to Fahrenheit and we never changed it. 350F...
On Fahrenheit, the Americans are surely right. For describing the weather, a system where the usual range is 30-100 is clearly more useful than one where it's 0-37, because you can say "high 70s" instead of the weirdly specific "about 27", and "low 40s" instead of the awkward "around 5 to 7".
I say this as a European who has never used Fahrenheit.
Oh, and fahrenheit, what the hell it means? 0ºC means ice, 100ºC means boiling water, 40º feels summer around here..
I guess I'm saying that you understand the values of the imperial system because you're used to them, as I'm used to values in the metric system..
Feet are slightly more convent for declining human sized things because meters are just a little too big to describe human height and centimeters are a bit you
If you were designing a system to describe humans with no other consideration you’d probably pick one where 10 units was the average human height. And feet is closer to that than meters. Also you can divide 12 by 6 and 3.
I’m not saying that customary is superior just that it does has certain advantages.
To you, a 0-100 scale makes sense but to me it doesn't because 0f (-17c) is way rarer of a temp than 100f (38c).
Anyway, from the metric perspective, most people look at it like... 0 is coat and boots weather, + 10 degrees is jacket weather, + 10 degrees is t-shirt weather, and + 10 degrees is hot. IMO, using "freezing" as the reference kinda makes sense...
And 1/10 of an inch is a very common distance in electronics (PCBs)
I hope you can guess why that is, right? It could have just as well been .25cm instead.
I've personally lived in Marquette, Michigan and now live in Phoenix, Arizona and have experience both -40F(-40C) and 118F(47.7C). To me, the 0 = really cold, 25 = cold, 50 = mild, 75 = comfortable, 100 = really hot scale makes sense having lived through those extremes. But you're right, that's largely because it's what I grew up with. And with that in mind, it is extremely unlikely America would ever transition away from it for that very reason.
Obviously both can be adapter to.
But if you took a group of aliens and asked them to come up with a temperature scale that was only used to convey how cold or warm the temperature felt to humans, they would almost certainly use human body temperature in their design process not the freezing and boiling points of water.
This isn’t to say that Celsius isn’t perfectly fine and superior in most ways. I’m not insulting you or attempting to participate in some kind of culture war.
But if you find yourself unable to agree that one system has some inherent advantages over another, even if they don’t outweigh the disadvantages, you should step back and think a little more objectively.
I guess it is true for us living in US, but lots of people live in places where it never goes below 0 Celsius (32 F). So I could see them arguing the same with a 0-50 scale.
> But if you took a group of aliens and asked them to come up with a temperature scale that was only used to convey how cold or warm the temperature felt to humans, they would almost certainly use human body temperature in their design process not the freezing and boiling points of water.
Probably, even though they might just get the coldest (-128 F -89 C) and hottest (134 F 56C) temperatures on earth, and scales it from 0-100 so everyone is covered.
Choose your poison.
nope, this is mere familiarity. You find it more natural because you're more used to it, nothing more.
There is nothing convenient about a system where "below zero" and "below freezing" are not synonyms. Or at least that's how I find it. because of what I'm used to. But at least I realise that might be a fact about me, not a fact about the world.
Feet are closer to that ideal than meters. That’s all that I meant. Also 12 inches is divisible by 3 and 6. And if you get into fractions of an inch, you always stick with powers of 2 which makes some math easier. Some math so much easier in metric.
The more important factor is obviously familiarity. Both systems clearly work. But neither is inherently superior in all applications.
The only people who benefit from a switch to metric are kids (cause they won't have to learn the imperial conversions). And they, for better or for worse, don't get a say. If people really want the US to switch measurements so badly (which I have no idea why anyone gives a shit what our country does, it's not like it affects them), then they need to come up with an actual compelling benefit to adults in the US if they switch. 100 years ago there was one: you can do conversions more easily. But today there is not, and until one surfaces there's going to be zero pressure to switch units.
Like programming languages and UIs, it's what and how people use them. Imperial tends to be better because it's more "evolutionary."
Measuring things is "for humans."
If you want to try to understand why the US is so fucked up, just look at England...
And perhaps Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and/ or Great Britain, the British Isles, and/ or the United Kingdom?
Fucked up, indeed.
So no, as a human being, I'm fine with base 10.
Let’s go hexadecimal all the way.
Switching from Base 10 to Base 12 would be difficult. Instead we should go back in time and ensure we evolve with 6 fingers on each hand and foot.
https://www.wikihow.com/Multiply-With-Your-Hands
Those techniques can be useful. If you add toes, multiplying numbers up to 20 (like 16x18) is easy.
As for changing the world to counting in base 12, yes there would be some advantages, but really, good luck with that.
A true base-60 would have 60 unique symbols for the different digital values, much like how in our set of ten digits {0123456789}, none of the symbols have any rhyme or pattern with respect to the others.
Good luck memorizing the ~1800 entries of the base-60 multiplication table.
Base 10 really is used because our number system is base 10. And more so base 1000. Apart from some cultures.
If you don't make the base of the number system agree with the base used for converting between units, then conversion becomes so much harder. For example, it's not immediately apparent that 204 inches is 17 feet, but it is immediately apparent that 204 cm is 2.04 m. Furthermore, when the base disagrees with conversion factors, you run into issues like variable-length fields - like, "2ft 9in", "2ft 10in" (notice the inches transitions from one digit to two digits).
Actually civil engineering as a whole is probably a relatively mixed bunch – vehicles drawings (when you need to design the infrastructure to fit specific vehicles for example) and other small-scale details might be dimensioned in mm, the standard curbstone naming system in Germany is based on centimetres, while infrastructure design itself (definitely including the CAD drawings) usually works in metres.
12 divides cleanly by 2, 3, 4, 6
10 divides cleanly only by 2 and 5
Obviously downvoters who've never used a speed square nor tape measure before.
When things are not nice round units though both systems are equally hard. This is common in the modern world where we do a lot of things impossible 200 years ago.
in reality you almost never calculate on the job. You measure what is on the print and anything not on the print is figured out 'when you get there' by measuring the space left when you get there - which also corrects for previous measurement errors
I tried asking on a forum once on how this impacted default room sizes. I see standard ceiling size in the US is moving to 9 feet. I am assuming places on metric would not standardize on that number, but curious if they would just stick to the nearest half, or go to the nearest whole meter. (I "tried" asking, as people seemed to think that you would just design the room to be 2.74 meters and call it a day. That strikes me as very unlikely, as design tools really love "snap to grid.")
Now if we used base 12 numbers instead of base 10, and we had a system of units based on that, I bet we’d have the best of both worlds. No idea if Napoleon could have imposed base 12 arithmetic on most of Europe the way he did metric, though.