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Comment by RugnirViking | Hacker News Reader

> most people are still more comfortable with yards than meters

I feel this is highly context dependant, too. Hanging out with a rural group of people born in the 80s? yards. Anyone in a city and/or born after 1990 is probably more comfortable with meters

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When I was a student one of my mates was going on about the superiority of the metric system and how he wished the UK would adopt it fully rather than the heterogenous mix we actually have. The football was on in the background, and shortly after a goal was scored he exclaimed 'that must have been from thirty yards!' Personally I quite like the fact we use both, it underlines that our human systems of measurement are arbitrary rather than baked into the fabric of reality.

I'm too old to be a zoomer and too young to be a millennial, but I'm more or less bilingual with unit systems. Useful for a European who deals with the US often!

I find it mildly amusing that fully metric countries are seemingly stuck with some standardized measurements based on imperial units. Like how a soccer/football goal is 8 feet x 24 feet / 7.32 m x 2.44 m. Or how a standard shipping conatiner is 40 feet x 8 feet x 8 feet 6 inches/ 12.192 m x 2.438 m x 2.591 m. Or standard gague railways being 4 feet 8.5 inches / 1.435 m.

That's due to outsized British and American influence, but even that is waning. Nobody will change legacy sizes such as football goals, but every sport invented outside of those countries will use metric sizes. As the US wanes in influence, this will happen more and more.

I'm a year older than Conway and have never heard people using yards to mean anything other than a concreted or paved area, even in rural settings.

Maybe posh horsey types are different, but even they're mostly concerned with furlongs and hands and suchlike.

(Not wanting to disparage Conway or his work - it's likely that, as gp suggests, his choice of measurements is simply due to the historic source material)

I was in England last month and the road signs still have yards on them. Their government has a whole website complaining about it: https://metrication.uk/transport/roads/distance-signs/

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