I'm a physicist and have been working in the USA. The universal rule for solving physics problem there was: convert to metric, work the problem, get a result, convert the metric result back to imperial. Trying to solve any form pf physics problem in imperial is prone to fail.
You clearly haven't taken an engineering course. Students are required to work with SI Metric, American Engineering, AND British Gravitational units. Plus we had to be aware of historical differences including the old French metric and the Italian metric. It's not impossible. It just requires good "bookkeeping" and a knowledge of historical context. It gets hard going further back in time. Apothecary units are a pain.
Engineers on International System countries like Spain are not required to learn Imperial nor British for historic reasons. That seems a failure on your teaching system. We learn only International System because It is the International System. Imperial System is a way to keep USA citizen failing on math tests and keep certain persons on low qualified jobs.
@@johnchestnut5340so... A lot of mental gymnastics to do basic stuff. PS: for reference, yes I am european, but I am also an engineering student with a math degree already and I've never been to the US
@ivanjorromedina4010 Read my comment again. Unless you plan to never encounter old technology/equipment, you need to be able to work with other units. It's not mental gymnastics. It's the same bookkeeping as any other units. Doing a bunch of conversions, applying engineering equations, and then doing more conversions is a lot of gymnastics. Do the math. Then convert once of needed. Else convert once and do the math. Going back and forth has a higher risk of error.
Metric system is so easy to work with. 1kg of water = 1 litre. 1 cubic metre = 1000 litres. Imagine calculating the amout of rain water you would get off a rooftop given a 1mm of rainfall.
Of course, that one's just as approximate as the original meter, and not used as the actual definition (in fact, IIRC, the kilogram was the last physical-object definition to be replaced by a natural-constant one because, until fairly recently, we had no sufficiently exact measurement we could use for mass (which is why we use the speed of light for the meter, it's one of the precisest speed measurements we have and we already have a precise measurement for the second)). Essentially, for the new definitions, the whole point is to find _something_ in nature we can measure very precisely, and find a way to derive a unit from that - it should both be an improvement over the precision of pre-existing definitions and independent of actual physical objects. For some units, this was not so hard, but for some, it turned out to be a hard problem to solve.
@@KaiHenningsen Even then the rule that 1kg of water is 1 litre and 1 cubic metre is 1000 litres of water still holds. The new standard definitions aim to provide *better* precision for very precise scientific measurements, not to redefine how these units relate. If anything these natural constants uphold these conversion rates, while providing more precision so that scientific processes can measure even more precisely.
It doesn't matter how long the is, what magters is that the metrik system is logic: 1meter =100 cm=1000mm. A cube 10x10x10 cm (100x100x100 mm) = 1 liter (water freeze at 0° and boils at 100°) = 1kilogram= 1000 grams. All connected, login and very easy to work with.
So can it work out how many cords of wood will be needed to boil a moonshine mash consisting of 200 American gallons is water and 2 bushels of wheat, at an elevation of 1 furlong,
@@uwetheiss970but as long as you don't live on a high mountain, the points boiling and melting good for a household thermometer. Better than some freezing temperature somewhere and the usual body temperature of a person.
@@uwetheiss970 It´s 1013,15hPa because this is the air pressure at sea level. And 1Pa is defined as 1N/m² or 1kg/(m*s²). So you can´t say it´s 1000 because pressure is defined allready and 1013hPa is only a measurement. Maybe in old day´s it was difficult to cook water under water ;-)
Doing it at the end of the 18th century by measuring triangles using only a small part of the total stretch and then be off by 0.02% is hella impressive imo.
yes, absolutely ! ... and most important: the important part about the metric system is not the length of a meter, but to have only one single unit with prefixes for all measurements of the same type (eg meter, cm, mm, km for length, instead of inch, feet, yard, mile, and whatever else with weird ratios), and the easy relations of all the different SI-units to each other.
I mean you had a guy in ancient Greece that managed to measure the circumference of the earth with 2 sticks, a camel and good timing with an error of 7%. When you have the smart a lot of things are possible.
@@allejandrodavid5222 No, that's part of the few issues I also had with square and cubic meter. 1m³ = 1000L that is agreed upon. Now, how to get 1L, you divide by 1000. But also a cube of 1m is composed of 1000 cubes of 0,1m, because you have 10 cubes in length times 10 cubes wide times 10 cubes in height. So a cube of 0,1m makes for a volume of 0,1m³ and that is also 1L.
What is stupid about the imperial system is not the size of the unit, it is the weakness of the conversion systems. The metric system has been adopted by all but three countries in the world because it is based on decimal and the ratio of 10 between larger or smaller units. It's so much simpler...
Yeah, and metric units roughly the length of an inch and a foot would be extremely useful. On the other hand, we've been using metric since the french invaded us but many people still refer to half a kg as a pound.
@@HappyBeezerStudios if you mean adopting the metric and as colloquialisms still referring to old names... then I would suggest just going for 1/3 or 1/4 of a meter as "foot" (33 and 25 cm respectively, a foot is 30cm) and 1/4 decimeter as inch. Since one inch is 2.54 cm... make it an even 2.5 and make a foot 25 cm so its 10 times that big and both fit neatly in there as quarters of the measurements so you can neatly continue your language if you have to while still using the metric system and copying the benefits of conversion from it. A yard would simply have to merge with the meter and look at this, the colloquialism of the metric mile being 1.5 km even already exists so just nab that one which means 1500 "yards"/meters are a metric "mile" rather than 1760 yards (god why) and 1.609 km
Funnily enough... 25 cm is spot on the average shoe size 9 if you consider both men and women (if my quick google search is correct) so that would actually make more sense than the current foot measurement xD
@@SeeDaRipper... Is this really necessary? This person doesn’t have English as first language, so maybe you should respect that this person knows English at all! Or are you perfect when it comes to your second language (if you have one)?
@@lillm6874 Ma deuxième langue est également impeccable, j'ai simplement souligné l'ironie de quelqu'un qui se moque d'un Américain mais ne comprend pas l'anglais de base.
Weird video. I don't think anybody argues that the choice of whatever basic unit you use us ultimately arbitrary. The advantage of the metric system is that once you've chosen that unit, the rest builds on that basic unit in a systematic way. Using metrics that don't neatly build on each other makes life unnecessarily difficult and leads to unnecessary imprecision. When doing renovation projects in the US, our contractors have been half-assing measurements because ultimately stuff never stacks up if you have to work with feet, inches and fraction of inches. I've never seen that in Europe.
Yup I agree its an extremly stupid clipp at least with this tittle. Like you said its all bout the system not if the base measure unit really was "divine". And it said meter system in the titel not meter itself. If he had done that the clipp would have been fine now its basicly garbadge.
Especially when they could have attacked other weakness like, despite one of the main positives is that it's easy due to being consistent, there some silly inconsistencies. examples: The kilogram being considered the base unit of mass while having a prefix, instead of the base unit being the gram or the tonne or a different base name that equals the kilogram. The kilo prefix being lowercase instead of there being a nice rule of capital letters making the unit bigger and miniscule letters making the unit smaller. The micro prefix using a greek letter.
@@JNCressey I mean, bien sûr, but as shortcomings go, these require so much work to come up with, they seem a bit self-inflicted. I don't know anybody who uses KM/h (or is second the base unit and it should be KM/H?) or notes any practical impact of what's considered the base unit. The distinction becomes relevant for mega, mili and micro which all start with an m, but on a practical level, do you want to create rules to distinguish those and in that case do you standardize so all units use 2 or 3 letters? At some point practicality and going with established patterns just outweighs the benefit of standardization.
@@tonchrysoprase8654, I didn't mean the letter of the base unit would change to a capital. Mm, Gm, Tm etc would all still use lowercase m for the metres part, but the case of the k for the kilo part could have been capital so that kilometres would be Km. And instead of micro with a greek letter, they didn't need to make the word micro. they could made a different word for that scale which didn't start with m.
@@JNCressey Oh, right. I got the modifier vs base unit part wrong. As to the use of micro - I always assumed that those uses were customary before people formalized the notations. Either way, those aren't issues that tempt me to start using grain/fluid dram any time soon.
All American youtubers on this subject get it wrong. They don't even know what system they use in the US as they call it "imperial system" that current one was established after the US customary system.
But they don't use it , only in scientific , technical fields do they use it anywhere else they use the modified imperial system , yards, feet , ounces, fahrenheit .
@@gregorygant4242 nope, they use the International System of Units converted into strange numbers. All those units are defined using the International units. For example, the definition of yard is 1 yard = 0.9114 meters. The definition of meter is " the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 seconds". The Farenheit scale is defined on the Kelvin scale. The avoirdupois ounce is exactly 28.349523125 g. And I think this is enough to understand which of the two systems is better. As an Italian I am forced to admit that the French did it better.
The real issue with the imperial system is the insistent use of fractions, when the average american apparently believe the "one-third pound burger" to be smaller than the "quarter pounder".
wow I just had to look that up. But for what it's worth, even if there were a peer review survey on this, which there wasn't, it would certainly find that the vast majority of people know a third is larger than a quarter
Peer reviewed survey? It was a business idea that failed, and when people were asked, that seemed to be the reason. No one is saying that every single american is a fraction illiterate
@@FelixNielsen yeah according to hearsay about what a marketing firm told A&W. You’d have to do an actual study to confirm that very doubtable conjecture. Obviously Americans believing a third is not larger than a quarter is likely not the reason the burger failed
@@JackBlackNinja That way you can just about dismiss everything. Fact of the matter is a plenty of people have trouble with fractions, and not just Americans, thus making the the story plausible. Of course it doesn't really matter as the point is that fractions, to many, are not at all intuitive, and to some they are just outright incomprehensible. It is easy to make mistakes, even for the pros, if you have and of day or something or rather.
@@FelixNielsen huh maybe I’m underestimating how unintuitive fractions can be to people. Never would think that would affect much or many. I certainly don’t see it being a substantial reason for the failure if the burger, at least from my current reference frame
Funny how Ryan thinks we Brits don't understand IMPERIAL (the Royal clue is in the name) weights and measures considering the first Americans took them from Britain... Yanks just changed some of the figures used. So yes, we know what a "yardstick' is !? Additionally we still use miles, pints and mix up both Imperial with Metric measurments often. LOL 😂😂😂
@@sebv1086 nope, sorry, but that is wrong. British imperial pounds are identical to American customary units pounds. But once you get above that the diffinitions change quite drastically. So it's quite obvious that it's not only volume measurements. Certain lengths exist in one system but not the other. Granted they are the more 'exotic' ones and not used on an everyday basis.
The important thing to note from this thread is that the Imperial system and the US Customary system, while using a lot of the same terminology, are quite different. It's incorrect to call what the average American uses Imperial - they're US Customary units. BTW, Americans working in the sciences use SI units almost exclusively. (SI - Système international, aka International System of units - is the modern "cleaned-up" version of the metric system.)
For a country that is so bad at math, the United States is taking a very big risk. The metric system works in multiples of ten. Does the United States really believe that its people know how to use the imperial system in their daily lives?
@@LooKingG00d Yes. 12 inches -> 1 foot; 3 feet -> 1 yard; 1760 yards -> 1mile. To gewt from feet to meter easily, multiply by 3 and then divide by 10, i.e. 9 feet are 2.7 meters.
@@Llyd_ApDicta What about backwards - 53.6 meters to inches? That's easy mental math. and if I want to convert 147.7 yards to, lets even keep it freedom units, to inches? imagine if 10 inches would be 1 ft, 10ft would be 1 yard and 1000 yards would be a mile. Gawd...multiplying everying by 10 so you just move the comma to convert would so confusing...
The old measurement errors propagating in SI units isn't an oversight or an error, it's a feature specifically chosen to exist. All the newer definitions fit inside the error bars of the old ones. That makes them backwards compatible. Technically they aren't actually different, they are simply more precise.
For a country that is so bad at math, the United States is taking a very big risk. The metric system works in multiples of ten. Does the United States really believe that its people know how to use the imperial system in their daily lives?
The important thing with the metric system is : whatever arbitrary reference was taken to define the basic unit (meter / mètre), ALL the other units would be defined as decimal variations of the base, so it makes calculations extremely easy even between different fields of measure (volumes to distance, or weight), and much less error prone than conversions even within the Imperial system ;)
@@frankhooper7871 True, but the choice to switch to a decimal currency system is the same as the choice for a decimal measurement system, i.e. easy conversions and subdivisions. So the refusal to switch to some decimal system is equally irrational and above all stubborn...
Fun thing is that the foot is defined as equal to exactly 0.3048 meters and a yard as exactly 0.9144 meters. So by using imperial units you are indirectly using si (metric) units
yes, interesting and fun! Also IMHO how "the French" in 1795 apparently thought the metric system would be a good idea and "The British and some of their colonies" then went something like: "Yes, very amusing, thank you very much, but let's not!, let's do Pints, Pounds and Brexit instead! Would you like another cup of tea Uncle Sam?
For Joe / Josephine Average Citizen, the origin of the metre really is of no consequence. It's the use / application that is important. I grew up with the Imperial system but had to learn the metric in my 20s. So simple. Water freezes at 0'C and boils at 100'C. (Not that it matters but where did 32 & 212 come from?) An acre is 43,560 square feet (208.71 ft. x 208.71 ft.), or 1 chain (66 ft.) by 1 furlong (660 ft). which was the amount of land that a medieval farmer could plough in a day using a team of eight oxen. In contrast a hectare is 100 metres by 100 metres.
If I remember right Farhenheit was defined by the freezing point of a mixture salt, water and ammonium chloride as zero and human body temperature as 100. Two very variable measurements. But the craziest measurement is the acre-foot, which is defined as a one foot by one chain (66 feet) by one furlong (660 feet) volume. Or 6 x 66 x 660 feet which comes outto 43 560 cubic feet. Who needs such an odd unit. I know americans like to measure things in football field as estimate. Let's imagine they want to set up a new military training area, those can be pretty large. Would they prefer something the size of 59 837 football fields, or something the size of 60 000 football fields...
@@Not.Your.Business I think you should try and read what trevorkidd293 wrote, once more. If the metre/meter was defined to be a different length than it is now - then that would just be the definition and that is what we would use and that is what you would use to calibrate your instruments.
@@Not.Your.Business That's the point of redefining the units based on more repeatable measurements. If a meter is defined by 1/299 792 458 th of the distance travelled by light in a second... well, the fact that it's arbitrary doesn't matter. You only need to measure it based on this definition...
Metrologist here. (Metrology is the science of measurements, so knowing this kind of stuff is my job) Saying that the meter is 1/10 000 000th of the distance between the north pole and the equator doesn't require you to measure that length with an accuracy of 1/10 000 000th; only the best accuracy possible. It's alright if you're even a few hundred meters off over your measurement of the height of France, because in the end, it's only going to make your meter a few hundred micrometers off... and as long as everyone agrees on a unit that is only a few hundred micrometers off, it's alright. The standard meter stick was made of a platinum-iridium alloy, an alloy chosen for both its low heat deformation and its durability. The fact that the current measure of a meter is somewhat arbitrary isn't really a problem, as long as we know exactly how to reproduce the measurement of 1 meter. It's going to be hard to be not arbitrary about that, anyways... The same kind of physical object was used for weight : for 130 years, there was a platinum-iridium cylinder in a safe in France that weighed exactly *the* kilogram. Most scientists were happy once a better definition was found for the kilogram in 2019. Of course, scientists around the world could decide to create a new measurement unit for length that would be *exactly* 1/100 000 000th of the distance travelled by light in 1 second, but it would require everyone to change from a unit system 95% of the world already uses and that is pretty damn good... so it wouldn't be worth it. Remember, everyone : the only thing better than "perfect" is "standardized". As a reminder : If you think the metric system is arbitrary and doesn't make sense, remember that the imperial system's unit are now defined based on metric unit. An inch is *exactly* 2.54 cm...
interestingly enough, if we redefine meter with a more fancy fraction of c/t a bunch of equations will look way uglier than now, so its not a "95% of population" problem, it's just better now than anything
The advantage of the metric system isn't that a meter has the length it has. The advantage is that everything have the same base whether we talk about lenght, area or volym. That makes it possible to make quite a bit of calculations and convertions in your head without using a calculator. Also a lot easier to spot conversion errors.
The good thing about the metric system, regardless of how accurate it is to the distance between the equator and the north pole, is that it is a system of tens. 1 meter = 10 decimeters, 1 decimeter = 10 centimeters, 1 centimeter = 10 millimeters and so on. The imperial system is pretty random in comparison (1 league = 3 miles, 1 mile = 8 furlongs, 1 furlong = 10 chains, 1 chain = 22 yards, 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 3 hands, 1 hand = 4 inches, 1 inch = 3 barleycorns, 1 barleycorn = 333 1/3 thous, 1 thou = 1.44 thwips, and 1 thwip (which is the smallest) = 1/17,280 of a foot). And don't even get me started on Fahrenheit versus Celsius.
The distance between the equator and the north pole isn´t constant anyway. The moon´s gravitational pull causes a bulge moving around the earth. That changes the curvature and the distance between the equator and the north pole. An agreed upon approximation is good enough.
British pirates blocked the United States from adopting the metric system by capturing a ship that held tools that were measured in the metric system in the late 1700s.
the metric system works way better then what ever you americans do over there, everything goes from 0-100 you can calculate stuff in your head without thinking about thirds and quaters and everyone uses it because its just better
0:44 USA actually uses the metric system more than the average US citizen knows, It's being used in all engineering, NASA uses it, everyone how does precise measurements uses the metric system. It's just not used by the population
It's weird how, for many years, the British Commonwealth countries (not sure about other countries) had pounds, shillings, and pence when I was in primary (elementary) school. There were twelve pennies in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. A guinea was one pound and one shilling. We also used imperial measurements. Then, in 1967, (when I was twelve), we changed to the same denominations as the United States, dollars, and cents. So we went to decimal currency and later moved to metric measurement. The United States has decimal currency all along but has stuck to imperial measurements. Please rest up and get well. I began to feel sick just watching you. 😂😂😂❤❤❤
Fact check- the UK actually went decimal in 1971 (the decision to do so may well have been in 1967). I had to suffer learning to do 'Money sums' which involved £/sh/p until I was 7 - never got the hang of it - then they stopped teaching us that altogether, until they taught us about New Pence when I was 9. Edit: Rereading your comment I realsie you may have been in a Commonwealth country other than the UK, and so your dates may be correct for that country.
Well, 12 is really a beautiful number, divides and multiplies easily... but since our written and spoken number system is base-10 and not base-12, it gets annoying. But why the British mixed 12 and 20... I don't understand... choose one base and stick to it.
The video is missing the newest definion of the constants of the unit system because the video is 7 years old. On the 20th may 2019, a more precise unit system was introduced to match the units to nature constants😊
You can have a job walking around the countryside measuring triangles. Well, it's not triangles, and you don't always walk, you sometimes crawl through mud and bushes. The job is called a land surveyor or a geodesist. One of my mates is one, he studied in a land planning university, and he likes to play guitar and bitch about things.
Adopted in Australia in 1972 thats why us oldies know both and convert in our heads eg 1 mile is 1.6 kilometres or 1600 metres 25 mm or 2.5 cm is 1 inch 37.9 c is 100f
I always used 1km ≈ 5/8 mile. As a basic rule 25mm ≈ 1 inch, but 25.4mm is more accurate. But for me, I use it to convert back to the imperial system as I was 5 years old when we converted to metric in Australia. I still remember seeing the mph road signs but, of course have lived my whole life with decimal currency.
I know that there are many Americans who don't know why the metric system is better ... here's a little calculation example for which you don't even need a calculator just use any random number, let's say 5000, it's a nice round number 5000 meters are 5km or 500,000 millimeters if we make a cube out of that, each side is 5000 meters long or 5km this cube has a volume of 125,000,000,000m³ (5000x5000x5000) or 125,000,000 liters and if you were to fill this cube with water, the water would weigh 125,000,000kg or 125,000 tons now take 5000 yards and do the same without a calculator, and have fun and the best thing is the US American The measurement system is defined in US law by the metric system... so everything is metric, you just convert it ... to make it more complicated ?
Wow, Ryan, I noticed you seem a little off in the first few moments of your post. Hope you are feeling better soon. Love your post! You are very entertaining, even when you are a bit under the weather.😃
What he has not stated, and he really should, was that the metre was designed to be repeatable by anyone in the universe… a universal measure one might say… and now it is, as are all of the other metric base units. We never metrified time, so the second is now retrofit into the metric system by other physical laws of the universe. It is one of the all time great achievements of mankind.
So to remeasure the meter I first need a second. I don't have a clock. But when I arrived on this strange planet, I noticed that when I go to sleep at sundown (civil twilight) and get back up, the local sun is about 34° over the horizon. How many earth seconds is a day here?
@@HappyBeezerStudios the metre is defined as the distance that light travels in 1/299,792,458s in a vacuum (ie speed of light). The second is defined by the hyperfine transition frequency of caesium-133 x 9,192,631,770. Just because the minute, hour or day are not actually metric measures doesn’t mean that the second has no definition in the metric system.
1 liter of water is 1decimeter cube(dm3) which is weighted 1kilograms(kg). To heat 1kilogram of water for 1 Centigrade is 1 Kilocalorie(yes that is the energy written on your packed foods). So heating 1 kilogram(1liter) from freezing point(0 C) to boiling point (100C) is 100 kilocalories(kcal). Or if you want to use bigger numbers 1 ton of water is 1metercube or 1000liters. To heat that from freezing to boiling is 1megacalories(1000kcal) If you want to go smaller 1cc of (cm3 centmeter cube) water is 1 gram. To heat 1 gram of water from freezeing to boiling is 1calories(cal) Here for American units please calculate the energy needed for 1 gallon of water to heat from freezing point to boiling point? Good luck.
I will give you some hints: 1 gallon water is 8.34 pounds (lbs) Difference between boiling point and freezing point is 212−32=180°F Specific heat of water is 1 BTU/(lb·°F) (BTU: British thermal unit lol) 8.34 x 180 is your answer.
I love how his reason for it being imperfect is because of such a negligible error hundreds of years ago. I'd love to see him explain why imperial units are defined by the metric system today
The hills and mountains can be calculated out if you also determine the height above sea level for each measuring point. Just a few more triangles in the final calculation 🙂
Metrum is Latin and means "measure" or "gauge". From there, the French word "metre" derived (same in British English), or the American English "meter".
@@antoniocosta1034The Latin metrum in turn derived from the Greek metrón. But the word "métrer' was used in French before métre was used to define the standard of length, simply meaning "to measure". It was and is also used to describe the rhythm of a verse or a piece of music (as in "beats per minute"). In fact, it never fell out of usage in French from the time of Vulgar Latin over Old French and Middle French to Modern French. It is not as if in 1799, people went to Ancient Greek to look for a word they could use to name the new unit of length. They used a word they already used all the time and just added a new definition to it. So yes, the origin of métre is Ancient Greek metrón, but the direct ancestor is Latin metrum.
As a Brit can conceptualise: Driving 5 miles. Walking 200meters To buy a pint of milk and a litre of coke That I weigh 13stone and 11lb and can squat 100kg But I can't conceptualise: Driving 2km Walking 50yards To buy a litre of milk and a gallon of petrol (gas) That I weigh 75kg and can lift...220lb 😂
@@noefillon1749 i can convert. 1kg = 2.2lb I can squat 1.3x my body weight. But yeh we just have certain things weighted in metric and others in imperial. Someone tells me they're 185cm tall I got no idea what that means instinctually. But 5'11 I instantly have a feeling for their height without any thought. Yet if it came to an animal like a giraffe I need that shit in meters!
6:12 There are tons of people who do that exact job. They do it with modern tools but is the exact same job. They are called surveyors (also topographers) and they are the ones who measure plot limits or areas and help building things like roads or railways where they are suposed to be built. As a civil engineer, I work with them frequently.
Regardless of the science behind how long the exact unit is. The best thing about the metric system is that you have only 1 base unit per measure you want to make (distance, weight, volume, ...) and you just use the modifiers kilo, mega, giga,... to multiply by 1000 every time, or milli, micro, nano, ... to divide by 1000 each time. In imperial for distance alone you have many many base units which do not convert to each other by using powers of 10... which makes it extremely cumbersome and error prone.
As you mentioned changes in temperature, the worst thing that can happen to a system of measures based on physical measures is losing the measures in a fire. So, when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, the world lost the imperial yard and the imperial pound. The Weights and Measures Act 1855 is a bit wordy, so to paraphrase: some scientific experts got together that had previously compared their physical versions of the yard and pound to the physical standards, on a regular enough basis, that the differences measured between their copies and the lost standards could be reversed and averaged to recreate very close approximations of the original defining objects, and so they recreated four copies of the Imperial Standard Yard, the Imperial Standard Troy Pound, and the Pound Avoirdupois (not technically a standard measure because the lb itself was defined by the troy pound), and from the date set out in legislation the new standard measures became the original standard measures. Eventually, metric was defined by the imperial measurements in the UK, and when the metric measures were better defined the legal definitions got inverted with imperial measures being defined by metric measures, which were eventually themselves defined by universal constants. There was of course that time in the 1950s when we (UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia) had to get together to agree on how far a mile is and how much a pound weighs. Ah, America, a country where you can get all of your citizens to ditch the US mile in favour of the international mile, but NIST's surveyors and NOAA's meteorologists had to be given a little time (60+ years) to switch to this newfangled foot thing - "in the meantime, let's rename the US foot as the US survey foot to avoid confusing the American public". Edit: metre/meter literally means measure. That's why the time signature in music is also known as the metre signature or the measure signature, why the rhythm in poetry is known as its metre, why the thing that measures your energy usage is a meter, why the thing you watch to make sure your microphone isn't clipping is a meter, etc. In British English, only the distance measure and music/poetry measures are a metre, with most all other measures (and measuring things) being meters, including newer UK (natural) gas meters that measure usage in cubic metres (in comparison to the older meters that used cubic feet).
American here and I don't know what schools are teaching now, but when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s we were taught both the Standard system and the metric system. I think it's weird that no one else in the U.S. seemed to be taught metrics.
@@tubekulose No, they mean 'US Customary Units'. The US never used the Imperial system per say, as that system was not set into agreement by the UK till after the USA was founded.
As a Scottish person born in the mid 70’s, we were taught in both metric and imperial for measuring, though the calculations for converting both miles to kilometres and Fahrenheit to Centigrade were kind of skimmed over (or done in a way that they just haven’t stuck in my head) but kilometres and Fahrenheit mean nothing to me…I just know that the numbers will be higher than those for miles and Centigrade.
Wow, cool, I thought that in the U.S. people studied metric system only in a college or university when going to stem faculties. I wonder when they actually stopped this practice. Doesn’t seem to be a fed initiative from what I can say and yet as it seems it happened all over the U.S. As a European it took me a while to get accustomed to converting inches, feet, yards, pounds, hogsheads, gallons and other freedom units into smth more comprehensible. Inches are somewhat widely used here, especially in construction as the wood is usually measured in inches.
I was once calculating how to spec a speaker cabinet for a particular driver. We were having difficulty focusing it out and there's me, born 78, and my engineer friend, born oop north in the late 40s. I achieved enlightenment and loudly declared how we could easily since the problem by changing our size and volume units to be the cubic decimetre and decilitre. I got a muderous stare from the old school Yorkshire engineer 😂😂
1:40 - funny thing is - we can´t really measure that, we have to measure the time light takes to hit a mirror and come back. Otherwise, our electrical circuits are slower than the light, so it´s not a valid experiment.
How would they measure the distance from the pole the equator to get 1:10,000,000th? Well the law of large numbers means that even if you are wrong then your error is reduced by a factor of 10,000,000 which makes is pretty accurate.
1:20 - yeah, I´ve seen those - not as yardsticks, they´re a bit short... But add 4cm, and I can clearly remember some of my teachers breaking them on my desk...
One of the cool things about the metric system, is that you can estimate the volume of water from its weight (and vice versa) because one litre of water has a mass of one kilogram, and a weight of one kilogram force. Not a coincidence - it was originally designed/defined that way. (These days, of course they have a more precise definition - just like with the metre.)
Ryan is exactly the type of guy Continental European men don't like even if their last name is Ronaldo or Nadal. He is polite, charming, and most of all does not get bothered if someone says something to him that is off-handed. Like many Americans, he just ignores all but the most obvious insults and moves on to the next point of conversation. He also smiles way too much for European men to feel comfortable with around their girlfriends or even wives. And, not only that, i am sure Ryan tips all sorts of service people and thanks them for a job well done, something for example someone in France or the Netherlands would be nauseated by. Ryan, you need to head over to Europe, you will be loved there ---
The remarkable thing is that, despite the inaccuracies, just how accurate it actually is, given the technology of the time. And it was never designed in a completely arbitrary way that would change over time. It actually makes sense. In the UK, we still use both systems but feet and inches are generally relegated to measuring someone's height.
To sum it up, the reason you divide light into that many chunks is that's how many meters it moves in one second. So if somebody had decided to move it a different amount, then that number would instead be the dividing factor, meaning that while the meter NOW has a basis in reality, it's basis is based off itself, and so at some point along the chain was entirely theoretical.
We have meter long yardsticks here, often with the measurement in yard and inches on the other side. It's even called a 'duimstok' which translates as thumb stick and a thumb is an inch. This is NL, which has always had a lot of exchange with Britain for a continental country. Ironically a lot of bicycle measurements are still in inch.
@@TheSuperappelflapin de metaalgroothandel krijg je een buis van 33,4mm als je om een 1 duims/"/inch buis vraagt. 1.1/4 is een buis van 42mm in doorsnede. 3/4 is dan dus 26,9mm.
Oh I've seen a yardstick. Felt one, too. Was one of our teachers' weapon of choice. To be fair, it was a broken one so more realistically it would have been a 'two feet stick'.
I have a yard stick / metre rule, I use it regularly. It's got inches on one side and centimetres on the other. It didn't occur to me that it might be a rare thing but now you mention it I don't recall the last time I saw one in a store.
The point isn't that the definition of a meter should be perfect. The point is conversion and calculations are easier, to the point you could do a lot of it without pen and paper. 1000mM = 100cM = 1M = 0.1 dM = 0.01 hM = 0.001kM Same goes for volume (liters) But how about length to volume? 1cM³ = 1 mL Now do that with inches, feet, yard, miles and gallons...I'll wait....
6:08 It is still a job and it's called "expert surveyor" or "géomètre expert" in french. You don't measure THE meter anymore but you do measure triangles to make local maps (and with more precise laser tools)
Well, the Meter is based on our daily scale. Also, it´s based on 10, which allows to just move the comma (point), in order to calculate the upper or lower measurement size, like kg or metric tons -> 1000g =1kg, 1000kg =1 ton). Also, volume and weight are linked to the density/weight of water, which makes one Liter (10x10x10 cm = 1 dm³ of distilled water having a weight of 1kg ON SEALEVEL (pressure matters). In fact, it cancels out any conversion calculations, that´s why it´s used by science in general. Fun fact: When it comes to weapons, even US citizens use the metric system for some reason and there are more expamples for it, already. However, sooner or later the US will adapt this system, anyways - it´s just a question of time. But once your are on it, please make your billion the same as the european one as well, it´s so confusing to me. 🙄
The "european" billion is the same in all the world... except in the USA where they confuse the MILLIARD (a thousand millions, THAT IS 1,000 MILLIONS) for the real BILLION (A MILLION OF MILLIONS, that is 1'000,000 millions!).
4:03 The actual advantage of the metric system is only hinted at ... different units match well: you see this in the definition of the "liter". If this liter is water its weight is exactly 1 kilogramm and it will boil at 100°C or freeze at 0°C.
An error of 2/10 of a millimetre over 1m is pretty huge if you're navigating a ship, grinding a lens, building a skyscraper, or etching a silicon chip.
mm is only used for measuring distance in navigation so a 0.2mm discrepancy would make no difference, the part where errors cause big discrepancies is when following bearings which are measured in degrees and arc minutes, not mm, but even then 0.2 degrees or 12 arc minutes doesn't make a huge amount of difference unless the distance is absolutely huge like in astronomy and such, on the surface of the earth working to an accuracy of 12 arc minutes is being extremely accurate really as an arc minute is 21,600th of a full circle.
10:03 You're right, and even iridiated platinum will expand and contract under changing temperatures. What the video is glancing over is that the platinum bar to which it keeps referring (which, by the way, has an X-shaped cross-section to avoid warping) has two marks etched upon its surface which, when the bar is at 0ºC, are (meant to be) one metre apart.
One thing i don't understand is why the length of a line from the north pole to the equator would be different if it passed throughout Paris or Tokyo or Moscow.
@@rogeriopenna9014 look into the geoid. For example by the EGM96 geoid part of the indian ocean is about 100m lower than standard and part of the north atlantic and northern australia are about 80m above it. Add plate tectonics and gravity anomalies and the earth is extremely lumpy and uneven. The distance along Paris is longer than along Moscow. Which is longer than along New York, which is longer than along Mumbai.
Yes and no, there are applications where traditional fractional systems work better but at least the metric system provides a single universal standard of measure rather than everybody having their own quirks to their version of a fractional system..
That question about the temperature expansion of the platinum model is very insightful … and yes, the size of the physical model would indeed change with temperature … and that is why the old definition of the meter did indeed also include the temperature at which the calibrated measurement of model would be taken at (science channels often leave out the gritty details to avoid unnecessary confusion by viewers - but occasionally that backfires;)
6:12 Hum that's more or less a land surveyor job. Also the meter was redefined again in 2018 to get it rid of the hunk of metal, it s now based on *ahem* : "the frequency of hyper-fine transition of the fundamental state of an unperturbated Cesium 133 atom" ... that was a mouthfull.
The article I read on TIME (?) was that distance between the equator and the north pole turned out to be 10,001 kms (based on the metre that was derived). However, the French government of the time decided to cover up that part since they were embarking on a mission for the world to adopt the standard.
You should, if you haven't already, do one on the standard 1kg mass that is housed and maintained by the ANSI (I think), as well as the global standard stored and maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France
I love this story. I told the story to my Kids in the elementary school. Now they know where meter, liter and gramm are from. I do it before we start with it in maths.
In Germany, folding yard sticks are still called "Zollstock" which literally translates to "inch-stick", not "meter-stick", although they are marked in meters and centimeters.
What's good about the metric system is what was said all the way at that start. 1/10m ^3 = 1 litre = 1 kilo of water That's it. It doesn't matter how long a meter is exactly what matters is that length and weight are connected in this way.
@@PeRusliStA you did not get the point - he wasn't talking about the prefix, he was talking about how length relates to volume, weight, etc in a way that imperial units do not
@@mats7492 small correction: it's Germanic, the language family of which German is just one of the many modern descendants of. German speaking would mean: only places that speak German. Germanic includes a lot other languages as well (like Dutch or Frisian)
@@mats7492 In the UK that would be an electricity or gas METER. The mechanical or electronic measuring device, while the measurement is spelt METRE. Left over from when Britain spoke French for just over 300 years (in the ruling circles...). 😂
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 English is a special case. old English used to be Germanic but due to the Norman invasion a lot of Latin words entered the English language. so modern day English in more like 2 (arguable even more) languages wearing a trench-coat pretending to be one language. but yes, of course not all Germanic languages are the same. so i'm sure in some it might be called something else
If you measure distance from equator to the pole and divide by 10 million, the error would be 10 million times smaller not bigger comparing if you want to measure something in the scale 1:1. This is why they decide to choose something so big as Earth as temple, and only because there was nothing bigger to be measured.
For Europeans, the American system makes no sense at all and is just too grotesque unnecessarily complicated.
Do they have a system?
@@arturobianco848 I think they use 'cups' BUT I don't know how big her cups are......
When you need to find "a bit bigger" than a 1"-7/16 wrench in the toolbox.
My personal favourite: a pound of feathers is heavier than a pound of gold, but an ounce of feathers is lighter than an ounce of gold. 😂😉
@@MarabuToo My personal favorite is the Bavarian beer meter that is measured at the Oktoberfest🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺A measure of beer is 1.06 liters with foam🍺🍺🍺🍺
Not a single European would say that anything like the metric system was made by god 😂 This was such a USAmerican sentence!
Most american thing to say ....
@@pwghost, exactly. 🙃
Was my first thought as well 😅
As a frenchman i would be flattered to be God in this situation lol
fully agree ... which God, by the way? ;-)
I'm a physicist and have been working in the USA. The universal rule for solving physics problem there was: convert to metric, work the problem, get a result, convert the metric result back to imperial. Trying to solve any form pf physics problem in imperial is prone to fail.
You clearly haven't taken an engineering course. Students are required to work with SI Metric, American Engineering, AND British Gravitational units. Plus we had to be aware of historical differences including the old French metric and the Italian metric. It's not impossible. It just requires good "bookkeeping" and a knowledge of historical context. It gets hard going further back in time. Apothecary units are a pain.
Engineers on International System countries like Spain are not required to learn Imperial nor British for historic reasons.
That seems a failure on your teaching system.
We learn only International System because It is the International System.
Imperial System is a way to keep USA citizen failing on math tests and keep certain persons on low qualified jobs.
@@johnchestnut5340so... A lot of mental gymnastics to do basic stuff.
PS: for reference, yes I am european, but I am also an engineering student with a math degree already and I've never been to the US
@ivanjorromedina4010 Read my comment again. Unless you plan to never encounter old technology/equipment, you need to be able to work with other units. It's not mental gymnastics. It's the same bookkeeping as any other units. Doing a bunch of conversions, applying engineering equations, and then doing more conversions is a lot of gymnastics. Do the math. Then convert once of needed. Else convert once and do the math. Going back and forth has a higher risk of error.
Ooh, they don't like you calling it "Imperial". I mean mostly it is, but they changed a couple of things.
1 mile = 1760 yards
1 yard = 3 feet
1 foot = 12 Inches
This is stupid
1 Kilometer = 1000 Meter
1 Meter= 100 Zentimeter
1 Zentimeter= 10 Millimeter
This is smart
But God gave them imperial measurements? 😂
@@friedrichjunzt En Europe on ne s'occupe pas beaucoup de religions
@@friedrichjunzt the Greek and the Romans did....
Zentimeter 👍 🧘♂️
It is not smart. It is convenient. And it should be, goddamn.
Metric system is so easy to work with. 1kg of water = 1 litre. 1 cubic metre = 1000 litres. Imagine calculating the amout of rain water you would get off a rooftop given a 1mm of rainfall.
Of course, that one's just as approximate as the original meter, and not used as the actual definition (in fact, IIRC, the kilogram was the last physical-object definition to be replaced by a natural-constant one because, until fairly recently, we had no sufficiently exact measurement we could use for mass (which is why we use the speed of light for the meter, it's one of the precisest speed measurements we have and we already have a precise measurement for the second)).
Essentially, for the new definitions, the whole point is to find _something_ in nature we can measure very precisely, and find a way to derive a unit from that - it should both be an improvement over the precision of pre-existing definitions and independent of actual physical objects. For some units, this was not so hard, but for some, it turned out to be a hard problem to solve.
It's 10×10×10 cm = 1000 cm³
@@neuralwarp A palacon is a 1000 litres, it is a cubic metre and it weighs 1 ton.
@@KaiHenningsen Even then the rule that 1kg of water is 1 litre and 1 cubic metre is 1000 litres of water still holds. The new standard definitions aim to provide *better* precision for very precise scientific measurements, not to redefine how these units relate. If anything these natural constants uphold these conversion rates, while providing more precision so that scientific processes can measure even more precisely.
@@kaelon9170 That only holds at 4°C. For example, 1 litre of water at 20°C weighs approximately 0.998 kg. Pressure also changes the situation.
It doesn't matter how long the is, what magters is that the metrik system is logic: 1meter =100 cm=1000mm. A cube 10x10x10 cm (100x100x100 mm) = 1 liter (water freeze at 0° and boils at 100°) = 1kilogram= 1000 grams. All connected, login and very easy to work with.
Only at 1013 hPa boils water at 100°C! And I really hate it that it isn't 1000 hPa.
So can it work out how many cords of wood will be needed to boil a moonshine mash consisting of 200 American gallons is water and 2 bushels of wheat, at an elevation of 1 furlong,
@@uwetheiss970but as long as you don't live on a high mountain, the points boiling and melting good for a household thermometer.
Better than some freezing temperature somewhere and the usual body temperature of a person.
@@MrFrozenFrost I have no idea what you are trying to say.
@@uwetheiss970 It´s 1013,15hPa because this is the air pressure at sea level. And 1Pa is defined as 1N/m² or 1kg/(m*s²). So you can´t say it´s 1000 because pressure is defined allready and 1013hPa is only a measurement.
Maybe in old day´s it was difficult to cook water under water ;-)
Doing it at the end of the 18th century by measuring triangles using only a small part of the total stretch and then be off by 0.02% is hella impressive imo.
yes, absolutely ! ... and most important: the important part about the metric system is not the length of a meter, but to have only one single unit with prefixes for all measurements of the same type (eg meter, cm, mm, km for length, instead of inch, feet, yard, mile, and whatever else with weird ratios), and the easy relations of all the different SI-units to each other.
I mean you had a guy in ancient Greece that managed to measure the circumference of the earth with 2 sticks, a camel and good timing with an error of 7%.
When you have the smart a lot of things are possible.
@@Anson_AKB The good thing is also how the other units are based to the meter.
1L is 0,1m cubed, and 1L of water is 1kg.
1L = 0,001m³, no? Since 1m³ = 1000L @@the10thdoctor84
@@allejandrodavid5222 No, that's part of the few issues I also had with square and cubic meter.
1m³ = 1000L that is agreed upon.
Now, how to get 1L, you divide by 1000. But also a cube of 1m is composed of 1000 cubes of 0,1m, because you have 10 cubes in length times 10 cubes wide times 10 cubes in height.
So a cube of 0,1m makes for a volume of 0,1m³ and that is also 1L.
What is stupid about the imperial system is not the size of the unit, it is the weakness of the conversion systems.
The metric system has been adopted by all but three countries in the world because it is based on decimal and the ratio of 10 between larger or smaller units.
It's so much simpler...
Yeah, and metric units roughly the length of an inch and a foot would be extremely useful.
On the other hand, we've been using metric since the french invaded us but many people still refer to half a kg as a pound.
@@HappyBeezerStudios In France often too for livre. But our livre = 500 grams
@@HappyBeezerStudios if you mean adopting the metric and as colloquialisms still referring to old names... then I would suggest just going for 1/3 or 1/4 of a meter as "foot" (33 and 25 cm respectively, a foot is 30cm) and 1/4 decimeter as inch. Since one inch is 2.54 cm... make it an even 2.5 and make a foot 25 cm so its 10 times that big and both fit neatly in there as quarters of the measurements so you can neatly continue your language if you have to while still using the metric system and copying the benefits of conversion from it.
A yard would simply have to merge with the meter and look at this, the colloquialism of the metric mile being 1.5 km even already exists so just nab that one which means 1500 "yards"/meters are a metric "mile" rather than 1760 yards (god why) and 1.609 km
Funnily enough... 25 cm is spot on the average shoe size 9 if you consider both men and women (if my quick google search is correct) so that would actually make more sense than the current foot measurement xD
@@Someone-dv7hw exactly the kind of units I'm thinking about.
Only a american would say the metric system isnt perfect.
*an
@@SeeDaRipper... Where is the Bus?
@@DieGurke_ Eh?
@@SeeDaRipper...
Is this really necessary? This person doesn’t have English as first language, so maybe you should respect that this person knows English at all!
Or are you perfect when it comes to your second language (if you have one)?
@@lillm6874 Ma deuxième langue est également impeccable, j'ai simplement souligné l'ironie de quelqu'un qui se moque d'un Américain mais ne comprend pas l'anglais de base.
Weird video. I don't think anybody argues that the choice of whatever basic unit you use us ultimately arbitrary. The advantage of the metric system is that once you've chosen that unit, the rest builds on that basic unit in a systematic way. Using metrics that don't neatly build on each other makes life unnecessarily difficult and leads to unnecessary imprecision. When doing renovation projects in the US, our contractors have been half-assing measurements because ultimately stuff never stacks up if you have to work with feet, inches and fraction of inches. I've never seen that in Europe.
Yup I agree its an extremly stupid clipp at least with this tittle. Like you said its all bout the system not if the base measure unit really was "divine". And it said meter system in the titel not meter itself. If he had done that the clipp would have been fine now its basicly garbadge.
Especially when they could have attacked other weakness like, despite one of the main positives is that it's easy due to being consistent, there some silly inconsistencies. examples:
The kilogram being considered the base unit of mass while having a prefix, instead of the base unit being the gram or the tonne or a different base name that equals the kilogram.
The kilo prefix being lowercase instead of there being a nice rule of capital letters making the unit bigger and miniscule letters making the unit smaller.
The micro prefix using a greek letter.
@@JNCressey I mean, bien sûr, but as shortcomings go, these require so much work to come up with, they seem a bit self-inflicted. I don't know anybody who uses KM/h (or is second the base unit and it should be KM/H?) or notes any practical impact of what's considered the base unit.
The distinction becomes relevant for mega, mili and micro which all start with an m, but on a practical level, do you want to create rules to distinguish those and in that case do you standardize so all units use 2 or 3 letters? At some point practicality and going with established patterns just outweighs the benefit of standardization.
@@tonchrysoprase8654, I didn't mean the letter of the base unit would change to a capital. Mm, Gm, Tm etc would all still use lowercase m for the metres part, but the case of the k for the kilo part could have been capital so that kilometres would be Km.
And instead of micro with a greek letter, they didn't need to make the word micro. they could made a different word for that scale which didn't start with m.
@@JNCressey Oh, right. I got the modifier vs base unit part wrong. As to the use of micro - I always assumed that those uses were customary before people formalized the notations.
Either way, those aren't issues that tempt me to start using grain/fluid dram any time soon.
The US customary system is definded by metric in US law..
All American youtubers on this subject get it wrong. They don't even know what system they use in the US as they call it "imperial system" that current one was established after the US customary system.
@@nedludd7622 good to know
Do they spell it Meteric?
But they don't use it , only in scientific , technical fields do they use it anywhere else they use the modified imperial
system , yards, feet , ounces, fahrenheit .
@@gregorygant4242 nope, they use the International System of Units converted into strange numbers. All those units are defined using the International units. For example, the definition of yard is 1 yard = 0.9114 meters. The definition of meter is " the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 seconds".
The Farenheit scale is defined on the Kelvin scale. The avoirdupois ounce is exactly 28.349523125 g. And I think this is enough to understand which of the two systems is better.
As an Italian I am forced to admit that the French did it better.
The real issue with the imperial system is the insistent use of fractions, when the average american apparently believe the "one-third pound burger" to be smaller than the "quarter pounder".
wow I just had to look that up. But for what it's worth, even if there were a peer review survey on this, which there wasn't, it would certainly find that the vast majority of people know a third is larger than a quarter
Peer reviewed survey? It was a business idea that failed, and when people were asked, that seemed to be the reason. No one is saying that every single american is a fraction illiterate
@@FelixNielsen yeah according to hearsay about what a marketing firm told A&W. You’d have to do an actual study to confirm that very doubtable conjecture. Obviously Americans believing a third is not larger than a quarter is likely not the reason the burger failed
@@JackBlackNinja That way you can just about dismiss everything. Fact of the matter is a plenty of people have trouble with fractions, and not just Americans, thus making the the story plausible.
Of course it doesn't really matter as the point is that fractions, to many, are not at all intuitive, and to some they are just outright incomprehensible. It is easy to make mistakes, even for the pros, if you have and of day or something or rather.
@@FelixNielsen huh maybe I’m underestimating how unintuitive fractions can be to people. Never would think that would affect much or many. I certainly don’t see it being a substantial reason for the failure if the burger, at least from my current reference frame
Americans think they understand Imperial measurements, yet have no concept of stones and have their own measurements for pints, ounces etc.
hogshead, barleycorn,
Funny how Ryan thinks we Brits don't understand IMPERIAL (the Royal clue is in the name) weights and measures considering the first Americans took them from Britain... Yanks just changed some of the figures used. So yes, we know what a "yardstick' is !? Additionally we still use miles, pints and mix up both Imperial with Metric measurments often. LOL 😂😂😂
@@sebv1086 nope, sorry, but that is wrong. British imperial pounds are identical to American customary units pounds. But once you get above that the diffinitions change quite drastically.
So it's quite obvious that it's not only volume measurements.
Certain lengths exist in one system but not the other. Granted they are the more 'exotic' ones and not used on an everyday basis.
The important thing to note from this thread is that the Imperial system and the US Customary system, while using a lot of the same terminology, are quite different. It's incorrect to call what the average American uses Imperial - they're US Customary units.
BTW, Americans working in the sciences use SI units almost exclusively. (SI - Système international, aka International System of units - is the modern "cleaned-up" version of the metric system.)
@@sebv1086 No , Americans use things like short tons which are 2,000 ponds instead of 2,240 lbs.
It's funny how everyone in the world except the United States can do something the same way and yet we're still the ones who have it wrong.
U.S exceptionalism at it's finest.
@@mehallica666 nah just their morbid main character syndrome
For a country that is so bad at math, the United States is taking a very big risk. The metric system works in multiples of ten. Does the United States really believe that its people know how to use the imperial system in their daily lives?
Like the date format.
1 metre = 100cm, 1 yard = 91.44cm, he was definitely holding a metre stick, not a yard stick! 😂
And it is divided in 10 sections, how to do it with yard stick? 9 times 1/3 foot and add 1 for "good measure"??? (and you get 1.016m!)
@@jaketzi8816 I was about o comment exactly that. The guy in the video so confidently how that was not a meter... :]
Is 1 yard at least 3 feet? I'm grasping at any sort of system in the freedom f'ing units
@@LooKingG00d Yes. 12 inches -> 1 foot; 3 feet -> 1 yard; 1760 yards -> 1mile. To gewt from feet to meter easily, multiply by 3 and then divide by 10, i.e. 9 feet are 2.7 meters.
@@Llyd_ApDicta
What about backwards - 53.6 meters to inches? That's easy mental math. and if I want to convert 147.7 yards to, lets even keep it freedom units, to inches?
imagine if 10 inches would be 1 ft, 10ft would be 1 yard and 1000 yards would be a mile. Gawd...multiplying everying by 10 so you just move the comma to convert would so confusing...
The old measurement errors propagating in SI units isn't an oversight or an error, it's a feature specifically chosen to exist. All the newer definitions fit inside the error bars of the old ones. That makes them backwards compatible. Technically they aren't actually different, they are simply more precise.
299,792,458 is not a random number, it is the speed of light in a vacuum. So it isn't error
@@igormatkowski5488 Sky is blue.
@@igormatkowski5488 lmao it's the speed in meters/second so if you define the meter from the speed of light yes this number becomes arbitrary
backwards compatibility is a good point! didn't think of that 🙂
For a country that is so bad at math, the United States is taking a very big risk. The metric system works in multiples of ten. Does the United States really believe that its people know how to use the imperial system in their daily lives?
The important thing with the metric system is : whatever arbitrary reference was taken to define the basic unit (meter / mètre), ALL the other units would be defined as decimal variations of the base, so it makes calculations extremely easy even between different fields of measure (volumes to distance, or weight), and much less error prone than conversions even within the Imperial system ;)
0:25 no, the metric system is the cornerstone of science, it’s got nothing to do with god.
I don’t knom Why he’s saying that …
Lmao fr, bro dont know whats he talking about
With the USA jumping up and down "WE WILL NOT GO METRIC" stupid when the USA was the FIRST to go METRIC with money.
No that's decimal not metric big difference !
@@gregorygant4242 The metric system is a decimal system...
@@VeniVidiVelcro Metric is decimal doesn't imply that decimal is metric; All dogs are animals, but not all animals are dogs.
@@frankhooper7871 True, but the choice to switch to a decimal currency system is the same as the choice for a decimal measurement system, i.e. easy conversions and subdivisions. So the refusal to switch to some decimal system is equally irrational and above all stubborn...
@@VeniVidiVelcro Had the metric system been created by Americans, they would have switched the following day!
Working when you are so sick is a very stereotypical American thing. Thanks for the content but don't forget to rest 🎆
He's at home - good for resting. He's watchnig over baby/ies: not good for resting. He's young and funny: he can handle it.
commenting youtube videos is not work. Even if he gets some money out of that process^^
Fun thing is that the foot is defined as equal to exactly 0.3048 meters and a yard as exactly 0.9144 meters. So by using imperial units you are indirectly using si (metric) units
and an inch is 2.54cm
@@mats7492...which, to my knowledge, is the actual U.S. length definition; a foot is therefore 12*.0254m, a yard is 3*12*.0254m, and so on.
@@MarabuToo instead of just using metric they defined their system by metric messurements and kept it..
classic america
You can also phrase it like this: the Imperial system today is a funny way to name funny multiples of metric units.
yes, interesting and fun! Also IMHO how "the French" in 1795 apparently thought the metric system would be a good idea and "The British and some of their colonies" then went something like: "Yes, very amusing, thank you very much, but let's not!, let's do Pints, Pounds and Brexit instead! Would you like another cup of tea Uncle Sam?
For Joe / Josephine Average Citizen, the origin of the metre really is of no consequence. It's the use / application that is important. I grew up with the Imperial system but had to learn the metric in my 20s. So simple. Water freezes at 0'C and boils at 100'C. (Not that it matters but where did 32 & 212 come from?) An acre is 43,560 square feet (208.71 ft. x 208.71 ft.), or 1 chain (66 ft.) by 1 furlong (660 ft). which was the amount of land that a medieval farmer could plough in a day using a team of eight oxen. In contrast a hectare is 100 metres by 100 metres.
If I remember right Farhenheit was defined by the freezing point of a mixture salt, water and ammonium chloride as zero and human body temperature as 100.
Two very variable measurements.
But the craziest measurement is the acre-foot, which is defined as a one foot by one chain (66 feet) by one furlong (660 feet) volume. Or 6 x 66 x 660 feet which comes outto 43 560 cubic feet.
Who needs such an odd unit.
I know americans like to measure things in football field as estimate. Let's imagine they want to set up a new military training area, those can be pretty large. Would they prefer something the size of 59 837 football fields, or something the size of 60 000 football fields...
It doesn't matter what the exact length is as long as everyone uses the same !
it matters for calibration purposes. how can you be certain your measurement is correct otherwise?
@@Not.Your.Business I think you should try and read what trevorkidd293 wrote, once more.
If the metre/meter was defined to be a different length than it is now - then that would just be the definition and that is what we would use and that is what you would use to calibrate your instruments.
As long as it is divided by 10, which it makes easy to calculate
@@Not.Your.Business That's the point of redefining the units based on more repeatable measurements.
If a meter is defined by 1/299 792 458 th of the distance travelled by light in a second... well, the fact that it's arbitrary doesn't matter. You only need to measure it based on this definition...
Listen to your Navigation system in your car.
It switches from miles, half a mile to 300 feet.
Why not to yards ?
Metrologist here.
(Metrology is the science of measurements, so knowing this kind of stuff is my job)
Saying that the meter is 1/10 000 000th of the distance between the north pole and the equator doesn't require you to measure that length with an accuracy of 1/10 000 000th; only the best accuracy possible. It's alright if you're even a few hundred meters off over your measurement of the height of France, because in the end, it's only going to make your meter a few hundred micrometers off... and as long as everyone agrees on a unit that is only a few hundred micrometers off, it's alright.
The standard meter stick was made of a platinum-iridium alloy, an alloy chosen for both its low heat deformation and its durability.
The fact that the current measure of a meter is somewhat arbitrary isn't really a problem, as long as we know exactly how to reproduce the measurement of 1 meter. It's going to be hard to be not arbitrary about that, anyways...
The same kind of physical object was used for weight : for 130 years, there was a platinum-iridium cylinder in a safe in France that weighed exactly *the* kilogram. Most scientists were happy once a better definition was found for the kilogram in 2019.
Of course, scientists around the world could decide to create a new measurement unit for length that would be *exactly* 1/100 000 000th of the distance travelled by light in 1 second, but it would require everyone to change from a unit system 95% of the world already uses and that is pretty damn good... so it wouldn't be worth it.
Remember, everyone : the only thing better than "perfect" is "standardized".
As a reminder : If you think the metric system is arbitrary and doesn't make sense, remember that the imperial system's unit are now defined based on metric unit. An inch is *exactly* 2.54 cm...
interestingly enough, if we redefine meter with a more fancy fraction of c/t a bunch of equations will look way uglier than now, so its not a "95% of population" problem, it's just better now than anything
4:12 the French word for meter is "mètre". Which is why the Brits still spell the word "metre", not "meter".
A metre is a unit of measurement, a meter is a unit for measurement.
It is also why it is called Metric, not Meteric ;p
"still" spell it metre? what do you mean still? That's how it's spelt
@@davidz2690 it's the British spelling. The US spelling is "meter".
@@arthur_p_dent Britain has quite a few languages, you mean it’s the English spelling.
@@davidz2690 we are speaking English in this comments section, yes.
That other languages may have different spellings goes without saying.
Fun fact: In Norway, we call a folding ruler a "inch stick". It does, in fact, show measurements in cm.
In germany we do the same and call it zollstock. 1 Zoll = 1 inch 😂
In the Netherlands too, we call it a "duimstok" (Duim = inch)
I mean i'm czech and I have seen a couple of those which had both inches and cm so i guess it's somewhat accurate?
Only for us it is metre not meter 😂
its meter you britbong bozo
French
Came to say the same 😄 ..only a few like the Yanks & the Phillipines spell it meter..but of course lol
METRE!!
A meter is a measure of rhythm
The advantage of the metric system isn't that a meter has the length it has. The advantage is that everything have the same base whether we talk about lenght, area or volym. That makes it possible to make quite a bit of calculations and convertions in your head without using a calculator. Also a lot easier to spot conversion errors.
The good thing about the metric system, regardless of how accurate it is to the distance between the equator and the north pole, is that it is a system of tens. 1 meter = 10 decimeters, 1 decimeter = 10 centimeters, 1 centimeter = 10 millimeters and so on. The imperial system is pretty random in comparison (1 league = 3 miles, 1 mile = 8 furlongs, 1 furlong = 10 chains, 1 chain = 22 yards, 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 3 hands, 1 hand = 4 inches, 1 inch = 3 barleycorns, 1 barleycorn = 333 1/3 thous, 1 thou = 1.44 thwips, and 1 thwip (which is the smallest) = 1/17,280 of a foot). And don't even get me started on Fahrenheit versus Celsius.
The distance between the equator and the north pole isn´t constant anyway. The moon´s gravitational pull causes a bulge moving around the earth. That changes the curvature and the distance between the equator and the north pole. An agreed upon approximation is good enough.
Only the USA could reject the metric system for being un american.
Such stupidity is unssuferable.
British pirates blocked the United States from adopting the metric system by capturing a ship that held tools that were measured in the metric system in the late 1700s.
the metric system works way better then what ever you americans do over there, everything goes from 0-100 you can calculate stuff in your head without thinking about thirds and quaters and everyone uses it because its just better
0:44 USA actually uses the metric system more than the average US citizen knows, It's being used in all engineering, NASA uses it, everyone how does precise measurements uses the metric system. It's just not used by the population
It's weird how, for many years, the British Commonwealth countries (not sure about other countries) had pounds, shillings, and pence when I was in primary (elementary) school. There were twelve pennies in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. A guinea was one pound and one shilling. We also used imperial measurements. Then, in 1967, (when I was twelve), we changed to the same denominations as the United States, dollars, and cents. So we went to decimal currency and later moved to metric measurement. The United States has decimal currency all along but has stuck to imperial measurements. Please rest up and get well. I began to feel sick just watching you. 😂😂😂❤❤❤
Fact check- the UK actually went decimal in 1971 (the decision to do so may well have been in 1967). I had to suffer learning to do 'Money sums' which involved £/sh/p until I was 7 - never got the hang of it - then they stopped teaching us that altogether, until they taught us about New Pence when I was 9.
Edit: Rereading your comment I realsie you may have been in a Commonwealth country other than the UK, and so your dates may be correct for that country.
@carolineskipper6976 Fact check: I am from New Zealand. Our government abandoned pounds, shillings, and pence on the 10th July 1967.
@@carolineskipper6976 I was thinking the same until I read they changed to dollars and cents in 1967 - so they're probably from NZ.
Well, 12 is really a beautiful number, divides and multiplies easily... but since our written and spoken number system is base-10 and not base-12, it gets annoying.
But why the British mixed 12 and 20... I don't understand... choose one base and stick to it.
@@raetalaward9128 Hope you saw my edit acknowledging that I had made an assumption!
This video has NOTHING to do with the title
The video is missing the newest definion of the constants of the unit system because the video is 7 years old. On the 20th may 2019, a more precise unit system was introduced to match the units to nature constants😊
You can have a job walking around the countryside measuring triangles. Well, it's not triangles, and you don't always walk, you sometimes crawl through mud and bushes. The job is called a land surveyor or a geodesist. One of my mates is one, he studied in a land planning university, and he likes to play guitar and bitch about things.
Adopted in Australia in 1972 thats why us oldies know both and convert in our heads eg 1 mile is 1.6 kilometres or 1600 metres 25 mm or 2.5 cm is 1 inch 37.9 c is 100f
The money was a struggle to me, to convert!
I always used 1km ≈ 5/8 mile. As a basic rule 25mm ≈ 1 inch, but 25.4mm is more accurate. But for me, I use it to convert back to the imperial system as I was 5 years old when we converted to metric in Australia. I still remember seeing the mph road signs but, of course have lived my whole life with decimal currency.
Dang Ryan, you are REALLY funny when you are ill. Great reaction. I still hope you´ll get better soon, take care of yourself. :)
The platinum meter was stored in Paris, in a vacuum at 0 degrees Celsius.
PS Be Smart is a great channel. I think you'll love it, Ryan.
I know that there are many Americans who don't know why the metric system is better ...
here's a little calculation example for which you don't even need a calculator
just use any random number, let's say 5000, it's a nice round number
5000 meters are 5km or 500,000 millimeters
if we make a cube out of that, each side is 5000 meters long or 5km
this cube has a volume of 125,000,000,000m³ (5000x5000x5000)
or 125,000,000 liters
and if you were to fill this cube with water, the water would weigh 125,000,000kg or 125,000 tons
now take 5000 yards and do the same without a calculator, and have fun
and the best thing is the US American The measurement system is defined in US law by the metric system...
so everything is metric, you just convert it ...
to make it more complicated ?
10 million is just the division, not an indication of the number of significant numbers!
Thanks for this awesome video. It was super interesting! Also I'm French and had no idea about this, you made my day! Hope you get better soon ❤
Wow, Ryan, I noticed you seem a little off in the first few moments of your post. Hope you are feeling better soon. Love your post! You are very entertaining, even when you are a bit under the weather.😃
It did make him sound a bit like a Californian surf bum tho 😂
I can't believe I missed "Les Measurables" when I watched Joe's video the first time around 🤣
What he has not stated, and he really should, was that the metre was designed to be repeatable by anyone in the universe… a universal measure one might say… and now it is, as are all of the other metric base units. We never metrified time, so the second is now retrofit into the metric system by other physical laws of the universe. It is one of the all time great achievements of mankind.
So to remeasure the meter I first need a second.
I don't have a clock. But when I arrived on this strange planet, I noticed that when I go to sleep at sundown (civil twilight) and get back up, the local sun is about 34° over the horizon.
How many earth seconds is a day here?
@@HappyBeezerStudios the metre is defined as the distance that light travels in 1/299,792,458s in a vacuum (ie speed of light). The second is defined by the hyperfine transition frequency of caesium-133 x 9,192,631,770. Just because the minute, hour or day are not actually metric measures doesn’t mean that the second has no definition in the metric system.
1 liter of water is 1decimeter cube(dm3) which is weighted 1kilograms(kg). To heat 1kilogram of water for 1 Centigrade is 1 Kilocalorie(yes that is the energy written on your packed foods).
So heating 1 kilogram(1liter) from freezing point(0 C) to boiling point (100C) is 100 kilocalories(kcal).
Or if you want to use bigger numbers 1 ton of water is 1metercube or 1000liters. To heat that from freezing to boiling is 1megacalories(1000kcal)
If you want to go smaller 1cc of (cm3 centmeter cube) water is 1 gram. To heat 1 gram of water from freezeing to boiling is 1calories(cal)
Here for American units please calculate the energy needed for 1 gallon of water to heat from freezing point to boiling point? Good luck.
I will give you some hints:
1 gallon water is 8.34 pounds (lbs)
Difference between boiling point and freezing point is 212−32=180°F
Specific heat of water is 1 BTU/(lb·°F) (BTU: British thermal unit lol)
8.34 x 180 is your answer.
I love how his reason for it being imperfect is because of such a negligible error hundreds of years ago. I'd love to see him explain why imperial units are defined by the metric system today
The hills and mountains can be calculated out if you also determine the height above sea level for each measuring point.
Just a few more triangles in the final calculation 🙂
Metrum is Latin and means "measure" or "gauge". From there, the French word "metre" derived (same in British English), or the American English "meter".
And in spanish , italian, german......"metro"
In portuguese is also metro.
In german is meter
By the way it is not named from latin but from greek, see the explanation at the beginning of the video
@@antoniocosta1034The Latin metrum in turn derived from the Greek metrón. But the word "métrer' was used in French before métre was used to define the standard of length, simply meaning "to measure". It was and is also used to describe the rhythm of a verse or a piece of music (as in "beats per minute"). In fact, it never fell out of usage in French from the time of Vulgar Latin over Old French and Middle French to Modern French. It is not as if in 1799, people went to Ancient Greek to look for a word they could use to name the new unit of length. They used a word they already used all the time and just added a new definition to it. So yes, the origin of métre is Ancient Greek metrón, but the direct ancestor is Latin metrum.
And guess where the Latins got the name from...
As a Brit can conceptualise:
Driving 5 miles.
Walking 200meters
To buy a pint of milk and a litre of coke
That I weigh 13stone and 11lb and can squat 100kg
But I can't conceptualise:
Driving 2km
Walking 50yards
To buy a litre of milk and a gallon of petrol (gas)
That I weigh 75kg and can lift...220lb
😂
That meand you have no instinctual comparison between what youo weigh and how much you can lift, that sounds so strange to me
@@noefillon1749 i can convert. 1kg = 2.2lb
I can squat 1.3x my body weight.
But yeh we just have certain things weighted in metric and others in imperial.
Someone tells me they're 185cm tall I got no idea what that means instinctually. But 5'11 I instantly have a feeling for their height without any thought.
Yet if it came to an animal like a giraffe I need that shit in meters!
2km is just 10 x 200meters so you can ^^
@@noefillon1749 WTF. You think comparison between bodyweight and physical ability is instinctive ?!
Now you need to look into the A paper sizes, A4 being the international standard paper size ISO 216
The ratios of the paper sizes are truly ingenious.
@@HappyBeezerStudios
1 : square root of 2
(approx 1 : 1.41421)
If you fold a sheet in half, the ratio of the sides remains the same!
6:12 There are tons of people who do that exact job. They do it with modern tools but is the exact same job. They are called surveyors (also topographers) and they are the ones who measure plot limits or areas and help building things like roads or railways where they are suposed to be built. As a civil engineer, I work with them frequently.
„A boulder the size of small boulder“ comes to mind
I remember when Canada went metric in 1982 🇨🇦
Regardless of the science behind how long the exact unit is. The best thing about the metric system is that you have only 1 base unit per measure you want to make (distance, weight, volume, ...) and you just use the modifiers kilo, mega, giga,... to multiply by 1000 every time, or milli, micro, nano, ... to divide by 1000 each time. In imperial for distance alone you have many many base units which do not convert to each other by using powers of 10... which makes it extremely cumbersome and error prone.
As you mentioned changes in temperature, the worst thing that can happen to a system of measures based on physical measures is losing the measures in a fire.
So, when the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, the world lost the imperial yard and the imperial pound.
The Weights and Measures Act 1855 is a bit wordy, so to paraphrase: some scientific experts got together that had previously compared their physical versions of the yard and pound to the physical standards, on a regular enough basis, that the differences measured between their copies and the lost standards could be reversed and averaged to recreate very close approximations of the original defining objects, and so they recreated four copies of the Imperial Standard Yard, the Imperial Standard Troy Pound, and the Pound Avoirdupois (not technically a standard measure because the lb itself was defined by the troy pound), and from the date set out in legislation the new standard measures became the original standard measures.
Eventually, metric was defined by the imperial measurements in the UK, and when the metric measures were better defined the legal definitions got inverted with imperial measures being defined by metric measures, which were eventually themselves defined by universal constants.
There was of course that time in the 1950s when we (UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia) had to get together to agree on how far a mile is and how much a pound weighs. Ah, America, a country where you can get all of your citizens to ditch the US mile in favour of the international mile, but NIST's surveyors and NOAA's meteorologists had to be given a little time (60+ years) to switch to this newfangled foot thing - "in the meantime, let's rename the US foot as the US survey foot to avoid confusing the American public".
Edit: metre/meter literally means measure. That's why the time signature in music is also known as the metre signature or the measure signature, why the rhythm in poetry is known as its metre, why the thing that measures your energy usage is a meter, why the thing you watch to make sure your microphone isn't clipping is a meter, etc. In British English, only the distance measure and music/poetry measures are a metre, with most all other measures (and measuring things) being meters, including newer UK (natural) gas meters that measure usage in cubic metres (in comparison to the older meters that used cubic feet).
American here and I don't know what schools are teaching now, but when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s we were taught both the Standard system and the metric system. I think it's weird that no one else in the U.S. seemed to be taught metrics.
That seems smart especially nowadays as the world is pretty small and surely it would be beneficial to know the system of others.
Metric is the standard system. You mean imperial.
@@tubekulose No, they mean 'US Customary Units'. The US never used the Imperial system per say, as that system was not set into agreement by the UK till after the USA was founded.
As a Scottish person born in the mid 70’s, we were taught in both metric and imperial for measuring, though the calculations for converting both miles to kilometres and Fahrenheit to Centigrade were kind of skimmed over (or done in a way that they just haven’t stuck in my head) but kilometres and Fahrenheit mean nothing to me…I just know that the numbers will be higher than those for miles and Centigrade.
Wow, cool, I thought that in the U.S. people studied metric system only in a college or university when going to stem faculties. I wonder when they actually stopped this practice. Doesn’t seem to be a fed initiative from what I can say and yet as it seems it happened all over the U.S. As a European it took me a while to get accustomed to converting inches, feet, yards, pounds, hogsheads, gallons and other freedom units into smth more comprehensible. Inches are somewhat widely used here, especially in construction as the wood is usually measured in inches.
I was once calculating how to spec a speaker cabinet for a particular driver.
We were having difficulty focusing it out and there's me, born 78, and my engineer friend, born oop north in the late 40s.
I achieved enlightenment and loudly declared how we could easily since the problem by changing our size and volume units to be the cubic decimetre and decilitre.
I got a muderous stare from the old school Yorkshire engineer 😂😂
7:05 No Ryan. That's the effect of the lord Sauron dying in the Lord of the Rings!
Well he farted big time and ran off in the smoke, too embarrassed to come outdoors again till the 3rd Age.
1:40 - funny thing is - we can´t really measure that, we have to measure the time light takes to hit a mirror and come back. Otherwise, our electrical circuits are slower than the light, so it´s not a valid experiment.
Get well soon, Ryan.
there is no cure for it (he is american)
How would they measure the distance from the pole the equator to get 1:10,000,000th? Well the law of large numbers means that even if you are wrong then your error is reduced by a factor of 10,000,000 which makes is pretty accurate.
this is the best "convert" you can get...
1:20 - yeah, I´ve seen those - not as yardsticks, they´re a bit short... But add 4cm, and I can clearly remember some of my teachers breaking them on my desk...
Only an American would say that the metric system was gave to us by god and not invented, The metric system is good because it was invented
One of the cool things about the metric system, is that you can estimate the volume of water from its weight (and vice versa) because one litre of water has a mass of one kilogram, and a weight of one kilogram force. Not a coincidence - it was originally designed/defined that way. (These days, of course they have a more precise definition - just like with the metre.)
In the UK we are very comfortable using yards, feet, inches and metres.
I still like to throw in the occasional fathom, league or rod when I get the chance 👍 😂
Especially when going for a PINT after work - who wants to go for a LITRE??? Just doesn't have the same ring about it. 😅
@@Rachel_M_
Don't forget the odd acre or chain either... 😂
I prefer using the furlong though.
@@AlexGys9... and chains for the balance
Ryan is exactly the type of guy Continental European men don't like even if their last name is Ronaldo or Nadal. He is polite, charming, and most of all does not get bothered if someone says something to him that is off-handed. Like many Americans, he just ignores all but the most obvious insults and moves on to the next point of conversation. He also smiles way too much for European men to feel comfortable with around their girlfriends or even wives. And, not only that, i am sure Ryan tips all sorts of service people and thanks them for a job well done, something for example someone in France or the Netherlands would be nauseated by. Ryan, you need to head over to Europe, you will be loved there ---
2 thenth of a milimiter off? screw this im going back to lobsters per square squirel
bullets per square child?
Red squirrel or grey squirrel?
@@Dreyno obviosly grey so they are set appart from the lobsters
@@JohnDoe-xz1mw So obvious when you think about. Much obliged.
The remarkable thing is that, despite the inaccuracies, just how accurate it actually is, given the technology of the time. And it was never designed in a completely arbitrary way that would change over time. It actually makes sense. In the UK, we still use both systems but feet and inches are generally relegated to measuring someone's height.
A meter is for putting money in when the electric runs out or the taxi has a meter running.
To sum it up, the reason you divide light into that many chunks is that's how many meters it moves in one second. So if somebody had decided to move it a different amount, then that number would instead be the dividing factor, meaning that while the meter NOW has a basis in reality, it's basis is based off itself, and so at some point along the chain was entirely theoretical.
We have meter long yardsticks here, often with the measurement in yard and inches on the other side. It's even called a 'duimstok' which translates as thumb stick and a thumb is an inch. This is NL, which has always had a lot of exchange with Britain for a continental country. Ironically a lot of bicycle measurements are still in inch.
Measurements for plumbing as well, pipe diameters. And measurements for screw thickness and other construction stuff.
In the UK, the majority of our tape measures (even electronic devices) have BOTH options available, depending upon the mood of the user... 😂😂😂
The measuring device I remember from school was the wheel that we walked around "click,click " measuring virtually everything 😅
@@stewedfishproductions9554 Electronic devices should do Furlongs, rods, chains and links too.
@@TheSuperappelflapin de metaalgroothandel krijg je een buis van 33,4mm als je om een 1 duims/"/inch buis vraagt. 1.1/4 is een buis van 42mm in doorsnede. 3/4 is dan dus 26,9mm.
8:16 nothing is perfectly smooth but the earth is still more smooth than a pool ball so still pretty smooth when put into perspective
Oh I've seen a yardstick. Felt one, too. Was one of our teachers' weapon of choice. To be fair, it was a broken one so more realistically it would have been a 'two feet stick'.
I have a yard stick / metre rule, I use it regularly. It's got inches on one side and centimetres on the other. It didn't occur to me that it might be a rare thing but now you mention it I don't recall the last time I saw one in a store.
The point isn't that the definition of a meter should be perfect. The point is conversion and calculations are easier, to the point you could do a lot of it without pen and paper.
1000mM = 100cM = 1M = 0.1 dM = 0.01 hM = 0.001kM
Same goes for volume (liters)
But how about length to volume?
1cM³ = 1 mL
Now do that with inches, feet, yard, miles and gallons...I'll wait....
6:08 It is still a job and it's called "expert surveyor" or "géomètre expert" in french. You don't measure THE meter anymore but you do measure triangles to make local maps (and with more precise laser tools)
Well, the Meter is based on our daily scale. Also, it´s based on 10, which allows to just move the comma (point), in order to calculate the upper or lower measurement size, like kg or metric tons -> 1000g =1kg, 1000kg =1 ton). Also, volume and weight are linked to the density/weight of water, which makes one Liter (10x10x10 cm = 1 dm³ of distilled water having a weight of 1kg ON SEALEVEL (pressure matters). In fact, it cancels out any conversion calculations, that´s why it´s used by science in general.
Fun fact: When it comes to weapons, even US citizens use the metric system for some reason and there are more expamples for it, already.
However, sooner or later the US will adapt this system, anyways - it´s just a question of time.
But once your are on it, please make your billion the same as the european one as well, it´s so confusing to me. 🙄
The "european" billion is the same in all the world... except in the USA where they confuse the MILLIARD (a thousand millions, THAT IS 1,000 MILLIONS) for the real BILLION (A MILLION OF MILLIONS, that is 1'000,000 millions!).
4:03 The actual advantage of the metric system is only hinted at ... different units match well: you see this in the definition of the "liter". If this liter is water its weight is exactly 1 kilogramm and it will boil at 100°C or freeze at 0°C.
An error of 2/10 of a millimetre over 1m is pretty huge if you're navigating a ship, grinding a lens, building a skyscraper, or etching a silicon chip.
mm is only used for measuring distance in navigation so a 0.2mm discrepancy would make no difference, the part where errors cause big discrepancies is when following bearings which are measured in degrees and arc minutes, not mm, but even then 0.2 degrees or 12 arc minutes doesn't make a huge amount of difference unless the distance is absolutely huge like in astronomy and such, on the surface of the earth working to an accuracy of 12 arc minutes is being extremely accurate really as an arc minute is 21,600th of a full circle.
I work in semi-conductors, and we use the metric system without problems to make chips (nanometers man, nanometers).
this error doesn't do anything if the meter is defined as such, because we would use this meter as our measurement
10:03 You're right, and even iridiated platinum will expand and contract under changing temperatures. What the video is glancing over is that the platinum bar to which it keeps referring (which, by the way, has an X-shaped cross-section to avoid warping) has two marks etched upon its surface which, when the bar is at 0ºC, are (meant to be) one metre apart.
Im using both and boy metric system is way easier for everything
One thing i don't understand is why the length of a line from the north pole to the equator would be different if it passed throughout Paris or Tokyo or Moscow.
Nationalal pride/vanity. Of course Our Line is better than anyone else's.
@@cathjj840 yeah, but the point is that it wouldn't be different if it was anywhere else.
@@rogeriopenna9014 look into the geoid.
For example by the EGM96 geoid part of the indian ocean is about 100m lower than standard and part of the north atlantic and northern australia are about 80m above it. Add plate tectonics and gravity anomalies and the earth is extremely lumpy and uneven.
The distance along Paris is longer than along Moscow. Which is longer than along New York, which is longer than along Mumbai.
Maybe they are considering terrain into the equation?
I have to correct the dude from the vid, France was not at war with everyone, everyone was at war with us because we put our king in jail.
9:57 you nailed. The expanding and contracting of that metal meter stick was a variable that they didn't account for but later learned
Yes and no, there are applications where traditional fractional systems work better but at least the metric system provides a single universal standard of measure rather than everybody having their own quirks to their version of a fractional system..
But you can use metric units with traditional fractions. What's your point?
ive yet to find a single application for non SI messurements
That question about the temperature expansion of the platinum model is very insightful … and yes, the size of the physical model would indeed change with temperature … and that is why the old definition of the meter did indeed also include the temperature at which the calibrated measurement of model would be taken at (science channels often leave out the gritty details to avoid unnecessary confusion by viewers - but occasionally that backfires;)
As I didnt understand the term "yards", my math teacher suggested reciting a "metre measures 3ft 3, it's longer than a yard you'll see"! 👍
'Math' ?
Except a metre is 3ft 3 and 3/8”.
6:12 Hum that's more or less a land surveyor job.
Also the meter was redefined again in 2018 to get it rid of the hunk of metal, it s now based on *ahem* : "the frequency of hyper-fine transition of the fundamental state of an unperturbated Cesium 133 atom" ... that was a mouthfull.
It's a job still in Germany. If you want that job, here you can walk around measuring and get paid for it by the community. 😅
A copy of the original meter is attached to our historical town hall in Münster, Germany, for dozens of decades.
we use both in the uk had to learn both for maths and science
.. and everyday use ...
The article I read on TIME (?) was that distance between the equator and the north pole turned out to be 10,001 kms (based on the metre that was derived).
However, the French government of the time decided to cover up that part since they were embarking on a mission for the world to adopt the standard.
You should, if you haven't already, do one on the standard 1kg mass that is housed and maintained by the ANSI (I think), as well as the global standard stored and maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France
Fun fact: the american system is defined on the metric system.
I love this story. I told the story to my Kids in the elementary school. Now they know where meter, liter and gramm are from. I do it before we start with it in maths.
If it's a metre long, it is actually a metre stick, not a yard stick. :p
In Germany, folding yard sticks are still called "Zollstock" which literally translates to "inch-stick", not "meter-stick", although they are marked in meters and centimeters.
What's good about the metric system is what was said all the way at that start.
1/10m ^3 = 1 litre = 1 kilo of water
That's it. It doesn't matter how long a meter is exactly what matters is that length and weight are connected in this way.
kilo is multiplier not unit -> 1l of water=1000g=1kg 😋
Exactly this - it also ropes in temperature and pressure.
@@PeRusliStA you did not get the point - he wasn't talking about the prefix, he was talking about how length relates to volume, weight, etc in a way that imperial units do not
No such thing as the meter system. Any case, it's metre.
not in german speaking countries..
here its Meter!
@@mats7492 small correction: it's Germanic, the language family of which German is just one of the many modern descendants of.
German speaking would mean: only places that speak German.
Germanic includes a lot other languages as well (like Dutch or Frisian)
@@mats7492
In the UK that would be an electricity or gas METER. The mechanical or electronic measuring device, while the measurement is spelt METRE. Left over from when Britain spoke French for just over 300 years (in the ruling circles...). 😂
@@ChristiaanHW Considering English is a Germanic language, I think this generalisation is a bit too broad, perhaps?
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 English is a special case.
old English used to be Germanic but due to the Norman invasion a lot of Latin words entered the English language.
so modern day English in more like 2 (arguable even more) languages wearing a trench-coat pretending to be one language.
but yes, of course not all Germanic languages are the same. so i'm sure in some it might be called something else
If you measure distance from equator to the pole and divide by 10 million, the error would be 10 million times smaller not bigger comparing if you want to measure something in the scale 1:1. This is why they decide to choose something so big as Earth as temple, and only because there was nothing bigger to be measured.