a defense of the imperial measurement system
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- it's not as bad as people say it is (but it is still pretty bad)
the chart: upload.wikimed...
NIST handbook appendix C: www.nist.gov/s...
Revised Unit Conversion Factors: www.nist.gov/p...
Weights and Measures Act 1985 Schedule 1: www.legislatio...
see also:
en.wikipedia.o...
en.wikipedia.o...
en.wikipedia.o...
/ hbmmaster
conlangcritic.b...
seximal.net
/ hbmmaster
/ janmisali
this is largely a response to this joke video matt parker made in 2013 ruclips.net/video/r7x-RGfd0Yk/видео.html
hmm
We could always try reeducating the populace en masse...
Or perfectionists can just cope.
The PAIN of imperial units becomes unbearable when you do even primitive engineering. E.g. in SI force: N = kg*m/s^2, work: J = N*m, power: W=J/s. Check those out in imperial, all that zoo of variations and accompanying conversion constants. As a bonus, say, estimate the force exerted by a water stream of 1lb/s at 1ft/s. Does divisibility by 12 or 16 makes it easier?
Bringing back RUclips video responses
I think you have missed that the UK system this is all based on has more units between a lot of these and they were used. Furlong and chain, for example. And stones in weight. We laugh at the US using pounds, we use stones and you ridiculously high numbers are massively reduced in the UK.
"Mass of a liter of water"
Diogenes walks into the room, holding one liter of Deuterated Oxygen-18 water: *BEHOLD, THE KILOGRAM!*
I laughed way harder than is reasonable for this joke
Or kim jong un walking in with one liter of heavy water (water with deuterium)
@@winterforlife Kim Jong Un might use that larger kilogram to claim he isn't fat!
Water evaporated, distilled, and deionized from the ocean
I can't believe he would snitch on the goldsmith like that
This chart is missing so many of the most used measurements in the US: blocks, football fields, over yonder’s, down-a-ways, go-thata-ways, hop-skip-and-a-jumps, ain’t-too-fars, outa-my-ways, and many others.
Around the corner and just over the hill
Then there is my favorite: Close enough for government work.
I am not sure what type of unit this is in.
@@TexasEngineer It's the formal definition of idgaf.
"Just-outside-of-(insert-major-city)"
A stone toss away
Just a note, a nautical mile has nothing to do with a typical mile. A nautical mile is the median arc length corresponding to one minute of latitude. Or 1/60th of a degree of latitude
I never knew that, always thought it was just a strange subset. TIL.
And a knot would be a nautical mile ("knot"-ical mile) per hour, or in other words an arcminute of latitude per hour.
@@rauhamanilainen6271 it used to be the distance between knots in a standard rope divided by the time it took the rope to get out of the ship when it was stuck by an ancor, I think
This highlights the point even further that imperial units were better at being subdivided, when there's a system of measurement that can be divided by 1, 2 ,3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10, not once, but twice (poor 7 lol)
@@dinamosflams Not quite. First off, in the good ol' days of sailing, they used to use a chip log (a flat board that would catch the water and would thus be stationary in the water) to measure speed. As the boat was moving, they would throw this over board, and then they would let the rope slip out and they would count knots set in the rope. The unit of "knot" does get its name from these knots, but the knots were set at precisely the distance required so they would translate directly into nautical miles per hour.
As my engineering professor says; imperial is fine as long as you’re not doing anything important
mmm you mean like going to the moon?
ps i know some metric was used but the bolts nuts welder rivits and evey thing that made and help make it was not metric some of the calculations were done in metric but only a bit of it
@@71midnight exactly! Or building the countries pride and joy aircraft. It’s reassuring when flying in a Boeing knowing it’s metric
@@ryanm.191 I think you may have miss read I am not that good at explaining some things I say all of the spaceship was made with imperial metric was only done with some calculations on the flight course and that's it
@Angelita Moore What do you mean? NASA uses exclusively metric and has done for 30+ years. Before that even then they still consistently used Metric to measure things such as heat on aircraft when accelerating into the atmosphere, length of certain parts, and etc.
@@axthla @axethelad yes but everything that was used to make it was not metric this was in the 60's metric tools were very rare in the US at that time only a few thousand and and that was mainly in the automotive industry.
The cars that they drove to work
the tools that they used
the building that they were in
the engine components and thrust components
the carts and dollys
the effect of aerodynamics came from the Air Force as well as Boeing and Northrop and other Aviation companies
most of the parts were made in Imperial
you said it you self nasa uses exclusively metric and has done for 30 years well yes your right on that nasa did not exclusively use metric when they were first started sending spaceships Nasa uses far more Imperial than you might realize at that time it was mostly Imperial
My favorite quote about metric and imperial system goes like this:
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade-which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
😂😂🤣👍
How did your metric system save you during the War? Oh wait it didn't, America did...
@@kasper7574 if you look in the books, you'll realise that it was actually the US government that started and orchestrated WW2... read up on "The Horrors" by Oswen Wilde, 1948... he died 1 month after publishing the book...
Millilitre*
@@clear.5999 yeah sure...
I think this is an instance of a larger problem where people conflate "the difference between X and Y is extremely obvious" and "the difference between X and Y is extremely large"
i think the difference is extremely large imperial sucks
@@linkhidalgogato what makes you say it sucks? So long as people clearly understand what is being represented by a measurement its working fine
@@mutantcube1737 i mean if ur bar is set that low then yeah i guess even the imperial system would meet your standards
@@linkhidalgogato wdym man? All units are arbitrarily defined based on their context of use. Metric was defined for the lab, customary units were defined based on quantities people regularly use in daily life. Don't forget why we want standardized units in the first place, it's all about making it easier to share information. That's really the only criterion for a successful system of measurements.
@@tissuepaper9962 metric wasn't design for the lab it was design to be easier to use and it is
its not just about having standard units its about having sensible and easy to use units
Fun fact, while we don't have a 30 cm lenght unit, most of us who grew in metric countries can probably visualize that lenght without subdividing the meter because the rulers you use in school are exacly 30cm long, i'm guessing people who grew up in imperial countries had the full foot?
Also we do say 30cm, no one uses decimeters, or decameters or hectometers. Much like miles and feet we almost never convert opting instead to use decimal point to increase precision at first.
Here in Ireland metal rulers are usually metric (30cm) and wooden ones are almost always metric on one side and imperial on the other. Tape measures are sometimes metric and more commonly both.
in the US, our school rulers have both metric and empirical on em and are generally only a foot/~30cms long lol
well decimeters are used in sweden semi frequently...
Exactly what I was thinking, although I would say metric prefixes always refer to a multiple of 1000 (eg kilo, mega, giga, micro, nano ...) with the exception of centi. So we would say 900m not 0.9km and 8km not 8000m
Huh, is this why subway subs are either 30cm or 15cm long? Nice! 😊
It sounds better than imperial bc why would i want a foot 🦶🏼👣👞 in my sandwich ?? 🥪🤨📸
The fathom, 6 feet, is based on the approximate average male arm span. This is useful when measuring the depth of water with a rope with a weight on the end, pulling it up hand over hand. I delight in this.
I can't fathom this
Simply unfathomable
Creator of “the chart” here; I never intended it to illustrate how ridiculous a system the English (length) units are, because I agree with your point: there is no actual system at all!
When I made the graph, I did so to get a better overview of historic and accidental relationships myself. The 6000 ≠ 6080 paths are in there deliberately, for instance, because those are two alternate definitions that have been used. The sibling weight chart has more of such cases.
By the way, did you publish your NIST chart to Wikicommons as well? It’s a nice and welcome addition.
Thanks for making it! It's really helping me out. Looking at it gives me a way more intuitive understanding of measures that I'm not familiar with, rather than having to pull out a calculator every time.
Yo.
Cool.:)
good idea! I've uploaded my chart there now. [ commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NIST_definitions_of_American_units_of_length.png ] I hope it can be of use to someone down the line!
Just goes to show how intentions are often lost over time, and especially on the internet. Kinda like with all these units nobody uses anymore.
@@HBMmaster Thanks, but I do suggest inverting the colours, since graphs on Wikipedia are black on white.
One thing I wish you had touched on was units of pressure, which are surprisingly bad in metric. A pascal is defined as a Newton per meter squared, which is a comically unwieldy unit to work with. A bar is defined as 10^5 pascals (breaking the otherwise consistent power-of-ten prefix system) and manages to be just slightly short of 1 atm. Atmospheric pressure is 1.0135 bar / 101350 Pa, which is sometimes enough to be a problem in calculations (but not always!). On the other hand, a psi (pound of force per square inch) is a much less unwieldy unit, and while atmospheric pressure is 15.7 psi I think it’s at least useful in that it’s never ambiguous whether or not you can be lazy and pretend 1 bar = 1 atm. Altogether I think this is a rare place where the metric system is at its limit and is arguable strictly less sensical than the imperial system
Edit: 14.7 not 15.7 psi
Also: people don’t use centibars, kilobars or megabars, they use kilopascals, megapascals, and gigapascals, which are tough because they’re defining things in terms of the awkward tiny unit instead of the not-quite-atmosphere-pressure unit and it’s impressively difficult to get a sense of how much pressure that actually is; I couldn’t give you any physical intuition as to what might exert a megapascal of pressure on an object. I’m a chemical engineering student so if there was anyone who should have that intuition it should be me. I can only (unhelpfully after a bit of mental math) say 1 megapascal is sort of like 10 atmospheres
That's why metric has sensible methods of scaling unit. The bar isn't exactly a hectopascal, but close enough. The bar is a non-metric measure, and the hectopascal and kilopascal (if you're Canadian) are the usual measure. The Pascal is closer in purpose to the psi.
Quick question: how many bar per psi?
Consistency and accuracy are more important than what you consider unwieldy.
@@talideon a hectopascal is .001 bar. If they are the same I am going to put you in a room at 1 bar then cut a small hole in it, exposing it to an environment at 1 hectopascal.
A bar is 14.5 psi.
@@martinsriber7760 I work with these units for a living, trust me when I say that it is preferable if your engineers have a physical intuition for what a unit is. Makes problem solving a Lot easier. Psi are stupid in other ways because of pounds force vs pounds mass but there is not a perfect unit for measuring pressure
Remember the good old days when there were 12 pennies in a shilling, except in Jersey where there were 13 and the Isle of Man where there were 14, 20 shillings in a pound and 21 shillings in a guinea? The penny was divided into four farthings and the farthing was divided further into halves, or thirds in some colonies and quarters in others. Common coins were the farthing, the halfpenny, the penny, threepence, fourpence, sixpence, shilling, two shillings and two shillings and sixpence or half crown. I should have mentioned that five shillings were a crown, but crown coins were often only issued in coronation and jubilee years. We should go back to the old system after Brexit.
xD
Ah yes the old days where conversions were a nightmeare
As an American, I was a bit envious of the superior British monetary system, at least until they needlessly desecrated it on the altar of decimalization. Still, sad to see it go, always sad to see something quirky and human be destroyed in the name of homogeneity and soulless standardization.
I find it funny that so many people who make fun of the Americans for their out of place systems when most of the "Americanisms" were shared by the two until the 1970s and 80s. I guess it's because you don't really need to LEARN English living in the UK, it's the native language. Even silly things like calling football soccer (a distinction because we have our own football of course) when Soccer is still used in Canada and older football fans in Britain.
I'm certainly glad we never had to deal with currency conversion for everyday transactions, though. I remember seeing the Pilot episode for Doctor Who where they talk about how in the future, the pound is put in terms of Decimals, which in real life, would have only been in 15 years but was unthinkable in 1963.
The guinea is hilarious to me. A unit of currency worth 5% more than a pound.
The way you constantly clarify how the metric system is still better has big "please don't hit me" energy
He didn't want to get the Salem Witchhunt treatment. 😂
Bcuz ppl online are still making comments that just say "metric better"
1:53 You would be surprised to find out that the definition of a mile was, in fact, 5,000 feet up until the 1593 "Weights and Measures Act" when it changed to 5,280 feet so the eighth-of-a-mile stade could become identical to the furlong which was used in land grants. In "The Customs of London" by Richard Arnold (1502) there is a record of a 5,000 foot distance being called a "mile."
And then there's the Swedish mile, which is 10km.
@@qwertyTRiG That sounds like a joke. I hope it isn't.
@@qwertyTRiG I think if the US would switch to metric, having new imperial units redefined as being very close to metric, for example an inch being 30 centimeters and a mile being 6000 inches would be good for continuing this as a vernacular unit but with standardisation
@@gamermapper Aye, that's basically what Sweden did.
Yes, I was hoping someone would point this out. This is why the Roman mile is included, because it was the Imperial mile until the mile was lengthened for the furlong.
Interesting quirk. There are ALMOST exactly 1550 square inches in a square meter, it's actually suspiciously close to being an integer, to 3 decimal points.
Yeah, I just did the math: 1550.0031000062
@@danielbishop1863 Would what follows be ...00000093 or 0000000124?
@@andrewhawkins6754 Come to think of it, now that you point that out, I'm wondering if it's just a coincidence or if the pattern actually continues. 155, 310, 620, ...
@@andrewhawkins6754 Not a coincidence it seems. The value in every group of 6 digits really doubles throughout the decimal expansion (overlaps due to carrying obscure this relationship past 90 decimal places). So 000015.5, 000031, 000062, 000124, 000248, 000496, and so on.
1550.0031000062000124000248000496000992001984003968007936015872031744063488126976253952...
Why this happens definitely has to do with the factors of 2.54^2, but I'm not really sure which ones and how exactly. An infinite geometric series, maybe?
Math graduated student here.
It's most likely because a power of 10 is very near to a multiple of 254*254 = 64516 = (2*127)^2.
Powers of 10 from 100 onwards have gcd 4 with 64516 so that is the minimal distance between their multiples but that could be achieved only by multiples of powers of 10 with coefficient different from 1 (does it?).
Out of curiosity I just wrote a program to calculate Bézout coefficients using Euclidean algorithm and found out that indeed 64516*15500031 is 999999999996
Numberphile once did a video on why a system with 12 digits would be superior to our system with ten, it boils down to the same advantage you mention for the imperial system: 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5, making it much more useful for intuitive divisions.
Watch "a better way to count" by jan Misali
10 is just more intuitive for humans though. We start counting by using our fingers and we generally have 10 of those. Once that is in place, it makes more sense to make our systems based on the number 10.
@@Jake007123 I feel like 12 isn’t so unintuitive
A dozen is a pretty nice unit if I do say so myself
@@NotFine My point was more about how very intuitive the number 10 is, more than 12. Twelve is a good number too, it's just that ten is much better.
@@Jake007123 The only reason you find 10 more intuitive is because your entire life you grew up with a number system that is base 10, so your brain thinks im base 10. There are tons of number systems that have existed, and still exist around the would that don't use 10 as their base for continuing
You're actually wrong about barleycorn not being used. Kind of. While it's technically not really used directly by most people, it's actually the basis for American shoe sizes.
measuring soles with barleycorns sounds very painful
Ohhh, NOW it makes sense
But as was said by a poster above, industries tend to make up their own units of measurement anyway. Like, "point" is an industry-specific term, made up because they needed something with that precise degree of fineness, and that scale, using whole integers (or close to) rather than decimals or fractions. Even if shoe sizes are technically in barelycorns, it's less that it's equal to barleycorn and more that it is "the shoe size unit"
Yay! I personally love the barleycorn. I'm glad to hear it's still used somewhere
So they aren't actually using the barleycorn then. I'm a size 13, and my foot is definitely not 4 and 1/3 inches long.
@@tissuepaper9962 It's more like barleycorn with the 0 placed at some size considered the minimum practical. Which is why it's different for men's, women's, and children's shoes
“The Chart” states hands are not in general use, but they are a common way to give the height of a horse.
People also use them to hold things, I think
If you think horse-measuring is "general use", I'd like to introduce you to the concept of an "outlier"
@@yozul1, honestly, I was under the impression the unit was used to give a sense of scale in horse races.
it's weird that the hand has an asterisk, but the point doesn't, but I guess a lot more people type on computers than they do ride horses
that asterisk is there because it's also there in the NIST handbook
My actual foot is literally the same size as the unit of measurement known as a "foot" so it comes in handy because I can measure things with my body.
We need to get time on the metric system, and get rid of timezones
@@chillyavian7718 True but we could easily use one universal time. Only in China they would sleep from 18:00 to 02:00 and work from 2:00 to 10:00 while in the US they would sleep from 06:00 to 14:00 and work from 14:00 to 22:00.
@@richardbloemenkamp8532 UTC exists?
Also, to non-Americans. Much in the same way that basically anyone who speaks a non-English language usually learns English, especially if they're young enough, most young Americans have at least a basic understanding of the metric system, for the same reason. If you say "5 kilometers" we're usually good enough to say "3 miles-ish".
I keep hearing/reading that, but considering number of Americans who ask "how much is that?" when metric units are used, I very much doubt it. You might be way too optimistic.
@@martinsriber7760 as an American who really was never taught anything about how the metric system works, I think they might be a little too optimistic
@@martinsriber7760 I have. It is taught as a standard.
yeah i cant convert celcius to fahrenheit but most rulers/yardsticks have the centimeters labled on the opposite side anyway so its not that hard to approximate it for length/distance
Unfortunately thats highly dependent on what education you got which is organized at the state level (In other words massively inconsistent). Especially if you're in a STEM heavy school or have a more modern curriculum you're likely to be working in metric a fair amount but the older the curriculum and the less focus on science in particular the less likely it is you've had much exposure to metric units. That's not even mentioning school to school variations which tend to be much more pronounced as you go up grade levels.
Also, nautical miles were barely mentioned but nautical miles (1852 meters) and derived units like knots have conversions to meters and miles but are defined as the arc length of one minute of latitude (1/60th of a degree) which is very useful for naval navigation, really makes sense on a global scale and would never be used or expected to be known by an average impearial user. Miles which are Roman paces (and does have a Latin prefix i just realized) are a totally different but similar distance unit
What's funny is that the nautical mile, being the arc length of one minute of latitude, is essentially defined in the same fashion as the original definition of the meter, being 1/10,000,000th of the distance from either pole to the equator. One minute of latitude means that the nautical mile is 1/3600th the distance from the equator to a pole. Exact same idea.
And despite metric seeking to rationalize everything into tens/powers of ten, degrees, minutes, and seconds are still around, because 60 is a fantastic number, being evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30.
"units having silly names is a good thing"
As a fan of the barn-megaparsec, I concur
What's a barn-megaparsec?
you forgot the football field (100 yards) which is used as a common intermediate step between feet/yards and miles
And isn't a soccer(football) pitch measured in yds?
Even though I’m American, I surprisingly was taught about centimeters back in kindergarten class. But that is all they taught us, I used centimeters so much I always thought they were a weird division of inches, I was shocked to learn centimeters are an entire different system.
Edit: Yeah so apparently what I find surprising is surprising in of itself.
America technically is on metric, because we define our imperial units by metric units, so it's not that odd imo.
What’s surprising is you think this is surprising. Most Americans are taught the entirety of the metric system alongside the US Customary. It’s weird that you were taught so little
When I was in elementary school, I think it was still thought that America would eventually go metric, so we only used metric units in Math.
Oddly enough, I've gone into a career in science, and we do use metric exclusively. (Yes I, and American, use the metric system. GASP!)
@@ClementinesmWTF That’s weird, I had to research the rest of the metric system on my own time.
@@jstnrgrs changing all the signs is a waste of money, and everything else that's objective has been changed.
I appreciate your comment on feet being a "comfortable" unit for working on human sized things. As a metric Australian (born in the 90s even), I do find inches far easier to visualise and think about than centimetres. Centimetres are too small for anything I'm directly going to use, and being a little bit off in my guess of a centimetre is proportionally quite significant. Estimating inches feels much more reasonable.
As someone brought up in an exclusively metric environment, I also have issues eyeballing stuff... Don't know if it's because of the metric system or because this skill isn't taught.
@@_blank-_skill issue, no joking tho.
My professor can say kinda accurated how many cm some stuff is just seeing it. He's mechanical engineer.
I'm trying to get that ability as well. 😅
There are a couple reasons why, and its because what they are based on. Each segment on your fingers is about an inch and your foot is about a foot, also because the inner side of your forearm is the length of your foot you could also say that the inner portion of your forearm is about a foot. You look at these things for 16 hour a day, every day, and see these things on other people at varying distances, which means it more intuitive at guestimating even when farther away. Not to say that a meter can't be taught to be recognized in real space, just that humans without outside intervention will relate to the things they can touch and feel.
Metric is better for exacts and abstracts. Abstracts in that you really don't visualize what a kilometer or mile is, you visualize how much time it takes based on how fast you are going to go what you are told is that distance. Its a scale that is too big for people to think about that way. And exacts as in... you know.. you need to follow something exactly.
Which is total self-deluding, strawgrasping bollocks. All that makes you look like is that you're afraid of numbers larger than one. Guess what, there is no inherent comfort in 1 inch over 3 cm just because one is 1 and one is not. Nobody said your feeling had to start with the first integer multiple of a unit. Comfortable is what you GOT comfortable WITH, including what number and unit you got comfortable expressing that with. This "comfort" argument is entirely and by necessity self-defeating.
You can just estimate in multiples of two. Like, I can estimate in centimeters up to like 26cm and then I switch to x2: 28, 30, 32, 34... In the same way I can only estimate millimeters up to 15, then I stop and go in multiples of 5
tl;dr
"Almost all measurements for anything are handled with one, maaaaybe two units, and while we technically need to be able to convert one unit into another for regulatory and legal purposes in various contexts, in common usage this is never done. And even though metric makes it a million times easier to convert one unit into another, it's still of limited added utility because nobody needs to know how many centimeters apart two cities are, or how many kilometers taller their child grew this year."
It's so easy to do that it is actually funny. From the top of my head, I know people who live a trillion micrometers away, and someone who measures 0,003km taller than last year.
@@leoyoutube123 Easy but pointless isn't actually a good design goal.
@@leoyoutube123 Also, are you really claiming that you know someone who grew 3 meters in a year?
@@leoyoutube123 Wait. 0.003 km is 3 meters.
IS it that easy to do the equation?
@@Duiker36 It is not pointless.
This makes any more specific calculations way easier.
Not that useful for everyday life, but for scientists and specialist - absolutely amazing.
I advocate using the plank mass wherever possible. It's about 20 micrograms, so it's useful in dosing certain drugs.
That's a very tiny plank.
isn't there a common joke that some Americans know metric quite well? to fend off your 1/8th of a gram from the rival gang, you'd use your 9mm
dang, I'll keep that in mind
issue I think is that it hasn't been measured as precisely as some other units, due to the difficulty in measuring G as precisely as one might want?
@@drdca8263 Eh, we got G to 6 sig fig.
I'd like to add that I really appreciate how the Imperial system of lengths works for sewing, as someone who does a lot of that. Yes, the metric system is easier to multiply by 10, but you are not multiplying by 10 when sewing. You are dividing, specifically by two more than once, which gets Real ugly with 10, but is very nice with 36 and 12 and fractions of an inch! I like being able to divide inches when doing seams instead of having to work in arbitrary numbers of millimeters (too precise), or numbers of centimeters (not precise enough). like you got 1" 5/8" 1/2" 3/8" 1/4" 1/8". very directly related to each other. all the precision you need. easy to remember. Also easy to standardize for different "types" of things you're sewing: clothes are 5/8" or 1/2" seam, accessories like purses are 1/2" or 3/8", quilts are 1/4", and French seams are 1/8". You can remember that and use it when you don't have a pattern to work directly off of.
Yards and fractional yards are also really convenient to work off of when buying fabric: inches turn into fractional yards really really nicely. You can take a 5'4'' measurement for a cloak, which is 64'' just by remembering the multiples of 12 (remember your times tables? i learned those in 3rd grade), which is 1 and 2/3 yards! Very easy to remember and go to the fabric store and buy the right amount of fabric (though i would round it up to 1 3/4 yards just to be safe).
I dunno. I think that being able to use a system that's really well optimized for some things is better than having to use something that's optimized for something else just to appease some nonexistent god of Consistency and Objectivity. Sure, the metric system is absolutely better for scientific measurements, but it is foolish to say that we are purely scientific beings. We are humans who have feet and digits and for the vast majority of our existence had no decimal system, no calculators, no easily accessible paper and pencil, and no idea what "universal constants" were, and the Imperial system shows that. In addition to all the completely valid reasons not to like the Imperial system, perhaps that is one reason people don't like it. But then again, who knows- I'm just a random person in the comments section of a RUclips video.
By your logic, Imperial is actually worse, since you can only halve, yet in metric you can also divide by five. Of course, this can be avoided by simply choosing highly composite starting lengths
@@Anonymous-df8it I'll clarify my point- my opinion as someone who sews is that the Imperial system is better than Metric for sewing, because it makes clean math with the divisions and multiplications and additions and subtractions you commonly need to do while sewing. I don't think I've ever needed to divide by 5 in any of my projects, because it doesn't make sense for doing anything with fabric. On the flip side, there are other things that Metric is much more useful for than Imperial: for example, I've worked with my dad in his metal workshop, and I have seen how being able to represent very high degrees of precision with decimals is useful for working with metal. It all depends on what you're doing, which is a sentiment I've seen many times, just often with the inaccurate implication that Metric is for when you're being a Smart Scientist and Imperial is for when you're not doing anything that requires math. I guess my original point was, no, actually, sometimes math with Imperial does work out better, it just depends on the kind of calculations you need to do.
@@river446 Out of genuine curiosity, do you ever really need to work with units smaller than ⅛ of an inch? That's about 3 mm, so using that and multiples of it when working with sewing in metric doesn't sound like it would be that bad. I should ask my grandmother how she does things, she does quite a bit of sewing.
On a related note, before now I had never really understood why unicode has fractions up to ⅛ but not really any others. It seemed so very arbitrary. I hadn't ever really given it any thought either, and not connected the dots when hearing about x/8th inches in some videos before. Thanks for (inadvertendly) pointing that out!
When I worked seasonally in construction in Canada, usually measurements would be to within 1/8 of an inch, but sometimes 1/16ths would be used, which I think could be eyeballed fairly well. As I remember, 1/8 was roughly the width of a saw blade, and also about the (shorter) width of the lead in a carpenter's pencil. The wood of a carpenter's pencil is 1/2 by 1/4 inch, which is convenient for spacing things.
Also, most of the Anglosphere really has no justification for throwing shade at the US for not converting to metric, because here in Canada and most of the rest of the Commonwealth, we still use Imperial for the kinds of easy, human-sized measurements that that system is good for; we've held onto these units in common practice because they are legit useful, and we can take no legitimate pride in converting fully to any one system. At this point, the focus should be on redefining the Imperial units such that their metric conversion factors are less awful. The inch should be 2.5 cm, the mile should be 1600 meters exactly, the pound should be 450 grams, the gallon should be 4 liters, etc etc.
China actually went even farther, often quite drastically redefining traditional units to fit convenient metric conversion factors when they last standardized in 1930. Their foot-equivalent is exactly 1/3 of a meter, their mile is exactly half a kilometer, their pound is exactly half a kilogram, and so forth. That 1/3 of a meter system btw is genius, since it fixes one of the most glaring problems with metric, the inability to third things, by simply bolting on units for 1/3 of most metric lengths and calling it a day; as long as the two systems coexist and have such sane conversion factors it works marvelously well. Similarly, their pound is divided into 16 ounces before moving to powers of 10 in its further subdivisions, just so as to allow for the intuitiveness of powers of 2 to be felt on that particularly human scale, and if anything I think it's a shame that that wasn't also used for volume where it would probably be even more convenient... though my experience with Imperial powers of 2-based volumes in cooking certainly colours that impression.
Point is, having a human scale to systems of measurement is extremely valuable, and it's something the metric system systematically lacks, and it's something that can be added with simple and sane conversion factors with minimal fuss.
This is actually genius. And heck, all you really gotta do is redefine the yard as a meter, which is basically close enough, thus the foot as 1/3 meter, inches 1/12 of that, so on. It would probably still be utter hell to convert between mathwise, but it would indeed solve the biggest issue of metric, which is the absolute nightmare that thirds are.
Probably the first comment I agree with. Objectively thirds are a disadvantage of the metric system. We mostly aproximate and round when we have to deal with thirds (like in construction or woodworking) or scale up (in cooking for example).
But metric not being on a human scale? I disagree with that. 0 degrees is freezing, 20 is roomtemperature, 100 is boiling. A centimeter is a fingernail, a decimeter is a hand length, a meter is a stride. A kilo is a bottle of water as is a liter. A quater liter (or Viertele in German) is one cup of wine. 2 centiliters are a shot, so a centiliter is a small shot. A quater kilo or 250 grams is a stick of butter, 100 grams is a bar of chocolate.
And so on
Obviously alot of these associations have been established after the fact (the butter for example). It still shows that it is perfectly pheasible to use metric on a human scale, as a huge part of the world does it.
@@carlosdumbratzen6332 But does anyone use decimeters? In my experience, people tend to go directly from centimeters to meters, meaning there's no unit at a convenient size for, broadly, anything from "a handful" to "a person's height". Which is most of what a person interacts with day-to-day. Temperature - sure, freezing and boiling are more-or-less at convenient numbers (depending on air pressure), but weather and habitation is crunched down into a much smaller piece of the scale as a result (thermostats tend to go for integer degrees Fahrenheit, but tenths of a degree Celsius, because a degree Celsius is too big) and I'd say "do I need a coat today" is more common than "how close is this to boiling" - if you're boiling a pot of water, you don't do that by thermometer, you do it by eye, right? Specific temperatures outside the "weather" range are relevant for meat and baked goods, but those temperatures aren't particularly related to the boiling point of water anyway.
Volume and mass, I won't argue, because the only time I would actually have practical uses for those units is for recipes, and at that point the convenient size is "whatever your recipe and/or measuring tools are marked in". Whether milk comes in gallon, half-gallon (two-quart), quart, and pint sizes, or four-liter, two-liter, liter, and half-liter sizes is basically immaterial; it's all approximately equally convenient numbers and sizes and at no point do metric prefixes get involved in the latter case. Similarly for pounds and kilos, though I will admit to being surprised to hear that your butter comes in quarter-kilo sticks; ours comes in quarter-pound sticks (less than half the size), generally in four-stick packages, with the wax-paper wrapping marked at tablespoons for volume measurement for baking (eighths of a stick, so half an ounce, or close enough for the precision you'll be able to manage cutting butter by hand). A quarter-kilo stick of butter sounds like a pretty big stick!
@@qwertystop People usually say height in centimeters rounded to the closest so it's still basically decimeters
If you simultaneously define an inch as 2.5 cm and a mile as 1600 m, then you get an awkward 5333.333... feet in a mile. Though I suppose that's not really much weirder than 5280.
Imperial is a system perfectly fit for the English language: arbitrary and confusing due to a bunch of random historical factors but not so complex that it actually hinders our ability to measure things
English only looks special when it's the only language you speak.
@@PlatinumAltaria most other languages don’t have so many conflicting influences I can think of a few but English is fairly unique due to how much vocabulary it borrows from French while keeping Germanic Syntax. Another example of this would be Maltese, which has generally Arabic syntax and vocabulary with significant influence from Sicilian and Neopolitan, including an alphabet based in the Latin alphabet. English isn’t unique but it is different from the norm.
@@craigstephenson7676 It's also kind of the case with French, where most words aren't directly inherited from Latin, but borrowed from Germanic languages, other Romance languages like Occitan and Italian, or adapted straight from Latin words. Which I'm sure you knew, but it bears saying.
Hungarian is actually a really good example. Like English, a good chunk of the sounds in the language are probably only phonemic due to borrowing. Inherited Uralic roots are hugely outnumbered by Turkic, Iranian, and Slavic ones, with a dusting of German and Latin and a whole lot of words no-one is quite sure where they come from. I think I read somewhere that the case endings with /b/ (inessive, illative, elative) historically arose from a borrowed morpheme; that's the kind of thing we're talking about.
@@mac5565 yeah these historical quirks are around in every language but in English it’s more obvious than let’s say Swedish. English spelling and pronunciation has a reputation for being confusing and inconsistent (which is overblown) just like imperial conversions have a reputation for being confusing and inconsistent (which is overblown)
@@craigstephenson7676 ehhhhhh, thats honestly not that uncommon. like romanian is a romance language with tons of slavic influence and even french was heavily influenced by germanic languages (and now is taking on loan words from english).
i think its fair to say that english is quirky in that it doesnt have any cousins as close as most european languages do. makes sense, cause it evolved on an island with relative isolation, and it got two separate waves of influence from norse and norman french.
but from that perspective, english isnt as weird as language isolates like greek or japanese that dont have any cousins
quantifying what makes a language weird is kinda arbitrary anyway, but you can argue basically any language is weird cause tbh they all are
You missed a very common unit of those who use the imperial system: the “field”, or its long name “football field” = 100 yards.
As big as 13.4952 Olympic swimming pools.
Do you mean "football" as in the US or "football" as in other countries (which is commonly known as "soccer" in US)?
@@dixaba American football, which the field is also conviently marked every 10 yards up to a hundred like a ruler.
A football field is usually a measure of area, and is common in metric countries because American Football and Association Football play on the same sized field (or rather, the American Football Gridiron is within FIFA’s much looser specifications)
Then there's the standard unit of measuring large areas of land: the Rhode Island, equal to 1214 square miles.
It might also be worth pointing out that many countries (probably most countries) haven’t completely stopped using their old units. Countries like Australia and Canada still sometimes use imperial units. Japan has a set of units mainly related to housing area still in use. There is the Chinese pound. I’m sure there are more in other countries.
Honestly thats the dumbest bit about the whole measure stuff. Everyone should just agree on one standard, not mix up different systems.
That metric is better than imperial is just logical, considering imperial, like many other older systems (theres like a thousand definitions of a 'mile'), is a mess because it tried to bring many different types of measures together, and metric was later made as a logical standardization. Imperial isnt bad, just outdated, and keeping parts of it just causes problems.
Where in Australia is the Imperial system used?
The only time I ever see it is on really specific tools that have American origins. Things like router bits being defined as quarter or half inch shank (they also label the mm for those). But that is really really rare and really specific.
All roads, buildings, construction, schools, speed zones, everything is in metric
@@Nereosis16 Its usually some very niche applicatoins where imperial is still used. Its a bit overselling it to talk like those countries use both at the same time^^
And India uses lakh and crore constantly....
@@termitreter6545 "Countries like Australia...still sometimes use imperial units."
"Its usually some very niche applicatoins where imperial is still used."
Really?
Such as?
Individuals might.
Specifc industries might, like when keeping a constant to align with international standards, ie.aviation using feet.
But what are some examples of these "niche applicatoins" where the country of Australia use "imperial units?"
I always thought the reason imperial had such abstract convertions was because all of the measurements were different and someone decided to merge them all...
and I was kind of right?
Yes. Imperial measurements developed organically to measure stuff in a useful way. Arguably less "arbitrary" than the metric system. A foot is a large adult human foot. A nautical mile is one degree of latitude. A bushel is a...bushel. But those natural units needed to be standardized for trade since everyone had different sized feet.
@@p1xelat3d If you want people to be able to read that you're gonna need to use punctuation.
@@staalman1226 whats a punctuation is it edible
@@staalman1226 For the most part people can type without punctuation, and it still be mostly readable. It's when its more than one, or two sentences; That it can get confusing.
For the most part people can type without punctuation and it still be mostly readable Its when its more than one or two sentences That it can get confusing
A while ago at work, I was getting slightly different results on a calculation than the coworker who originally did them. We both went through them several times before realizing that he's British and so was using British therms while I was using U.S. therms. To make a long story short, the difference between them is 1.037 and suppliers rarely indicate which one they're using.
Damn lmao
US therms < BTU < KJ
Personally, I agree that the metric system is superior, and the imperial sometimes gets talked down on. But what I believe to be the best system for measuring length is the Smoot system, developed by students at MIT
I went to high school with Oliver Smoot's son Steve. Steve eventually went to MIT and they measured the bridge in terms of him; I don't recall how his height compares exactly to his father's. I think it was pretty similar.
Fun fact: Smoot because the chairman of ANSI and later the president of ISO
I know I'm a year late to this video, but in the meantime studying physics has made me gain an even grater appreciation of the metric system. The biggest problem with the imperial system is not conversion between different units of the same physical dimension (which I get that Americans don't do), but conversion between different dimensions. In the SI system of measurement, the unit of force is the Newton, which is defined based on the other base SI units as 1 N = 1 kg*m/s^2. Given this relation, it's really easy to derive a force from a mass and an acceleration, plus, even if you are given some measurements in a multiple of a specific unit (like being given a mass in grams instead of kg), it's easy enough to convert to their base units for your final calculation. This cannot be done easily in the imperial system, as, for example, the imperial unit of force most commonly used is the pound-force, lbf, where 1 lbf = 32.2 lbs*ft/s^2, so in any calculations involving force, mass and acceleration, you are required to convert your units. You might say that the imperial system also has the poundel, where 1 pdl = 1 lbs*ft/s^2, mimicking the relationship that exists in metric between the Newton and the base units, but, disregarding the fact that the poundel is not widely used, the unit of pressure is still the pound-per-square-inch, which refers to the pound-force, requiring you to do a conversion. Dimensional analysis is an incredibly useful tool in physics to see if you've messed up a calculation, and the metric system just makes it so much easier to do.
I agree but also all the really good physics has no units at all
.....People are not rocket scientists. You'll probably find more construction workers and regular people then people who spend their life studying advanced mathematics, science and physics.
At the same time, in engineering it is indescribably convenient to have your unit of force be the same quantity as your unit of mass times the acceleration of gravity which is something that gets lost a lot: metric is a system created in a vacuum where as imperial is a system created in practicality
more commonly i think i see the imperial system being made coherent the other way around, keeping the lbf as the unit of force and instead defining the unit of mass as 1 slug = 1lbf / (1ft/s^2)
I shall add the amount of times I messed something while studying because I didn't knew if it was a pound of force or a pound of mass.
why is nobody talking about the fact that the distance light travels in a nanosecond is almost exactly one foot
seriously what kind of a coincidence is that
personally i think the standards people conspired to grow and shrink all the units imperceptibly over the course of decades to achieve this. they have pulled the wool over all our eyes.
@@Fopenplop we must expose big standard
It's even closer to 30 cm though.
I'm a hobbyist baker and I am very annoyed by the imperial volume measurements. Also the fact that ounces and fluid ounces have the same name but are only the same amounts for things with water density.
I just looked it up, and I’m very annoyed that while the British fluid ounce is quite close to the volume of an avoirdupois ounce, the US Customary fluid ounce is over 4% larger.
I’m a hobbyist baker, and i like the imperial volume measurements because i can convert between them easier. The metric units are better for most circumstances other than easy off the cuff adjustments.
@@jessehunter362 whats 3/4 of a quarter cup without looking it up? Whats 3/4 of 250mL
@@chair547 9 teaspoons, and i think 212 ml or something but i’d have to look it up.
edit: it’s 187.5
I bake too and the fact that water weighs about a kg per liter is so incredibly easy when mixing ingredients, I know milk is about the same and never need to use a measuring cup (or complicated math) when adding milk or whater to dough/batter.
My pancake recipe for example is 2 times as much milk as flour and an egg per 250g flour, no need for a measuring cup
For the record, as a gunsmith I use "grains" all the time as a measure of weight.
But that is confusing when the word "grain" is used for both bullet weigh and powder charges. ??? Why? Only one of those is made up of actual grains of material.
*weight
@@Jabberwockybird No, Jabber, it's not about the granularity of gunpowder. A grain is a very old unit of mass, equal to 1/7000 of a pound. (About 64.8 mg)
In the olden days, a long, long, time ago, apothecaries (pharmacists) used grains in formulating medicines. _Nobody_ uses grains as a unit of measure anymore except cartridge reloaders. ("Cartridge" being the cylindrical metal casing that holds a bullet and the gunpowder that propels it.)
That seems to be the nature of a lot of the units on “The Chart”. Hands is only used for horses, chains for railways, etc.
Who called for this record?
One fine point: the point you described is essentially not in use. Current use of the point is the Desktop Publishing Point, which IS exactly 1/72 of a Customary/International inch.
I personally quite like most of the smaller Imperial units for volume, since aside from teaspoons, they are all related by various powers of two: there are 2^1 tablespoons to an ounce, 2^3 ounces to a cup, 2^1 cups to a pint, 2^1 pints to a quart, and 2^2 quarts to a pint.
SI just got rekt
i think you meant quarts per gallon
and dont forget that some things are in half-gallons
do u not see the problem here
they are all random powers of two and they have a bunch of random names and not even the power of 2 thing is consistent the volume units are the worst thing in the entire system
its like Stockholm syndrome how do u not see how awful this is
@@linkhidalgogato Because skipping powers of two is so much more arbitrary than skipping powers of ten
@John Broadwell they are random tho 1 3 1 1 2 is a random series of numbers
and u know how u can adjust ur recipes with metric
u just change the amount
u can divide by literally any number u like and just add another unit at the end of the result until precision doesn't matter u dont need 20 different random units and like a million little cups and spoons
and dividing by 3 is simple just divide by 3
so what if its not an exact number this almost never matters
My grandfather and his brother used to measure things in “acrewalls” (660 feet) and “acrends” (60 feet I think) they also measured rain in points and distance in Irish Miles just to make it extra confusing, but they would never tell you which miles they were using so you just crossed your fingers and threw the map out the window.
It would have been 66 by 660 feet. It derives from the US Public Land Survey System, in which acres could be surveyed as 4x40 rods. Forty rods is a furlong, so that is the length you would plow before resting your ox.
If we had base 6 and kept the centimeter as it is, the meter would be 36 centimeters long, and therefore very close to a foot. Problem solved!
On a more serious note, the main plus point I have with the metric system is the easy conversion from one measure to the other. For example, the fact that I can weigh milk if I don't have a measuring cup is very handy.
Hi, print industry professional here. Points (and the related pica) are used throughout the American printing industry to describe dimensions in layouts of more than just the typography.
Also, the weird 1/72-but-not-quite isn't the flavor used in the industry. We use the postscript point, which was created by Adobe when they released the postscript language. It is defined as exactly 1/72", and when in this industry a point unambiguously refers to only this varietal.
Why not just define it by the mm or micrometer? Even older Americans can understand mm so why use 1/72"?
as an irish person, living in a country where we all use decimal but are all surrounded by media in which imperial is whats used, this video sums up pretty much exactly my thoughts. we use a strange hybrid system based off of what feels more "human", ike the comment you made on the length of the foot. similar to the uk's saying-they-use-metric-but-not-really, except we do actually use metric for everything except informal speech. examples that id feel quite strongly about are that im not 189cm, im 6 foot 2 and a bit. im not just less than 13 stone, im 82kg. the shop isnt 800 metres away, its about half a mile, but the car goes at 120kmh on the motorway, not 74.56mph. its a pound of butter, a litre of milk, 16 degrees celsius outside and my pp is a certain amount of inches long, not any amount of centimetres. just my thoughts as someone in the small minority very familiar with both 🤷♀️
I definitely see though at least in Ireland imperial units are becoming drastically less common in informal speech aming younger and younger generations. It could just be where I live but I can only speak from my own experience. I'm 17 in Leaving Cert, I and most people I know *do* say the shop is however many metres/kilometres away. I still measure my height in feet and a couple colloquialisms here and there but overall that's about it. And then if you get to around my parent's generation, they do mostly think of speed in conversation as mph. They do think if their weight in stone and pounds.
So, continuing this trend, I can see metric replacing imperial in informal speech more and more as time goes by
@@lizardlegend42 tbh i agree with u ab that, was just saying how i see it at the moment.. im 18 lol just did my lc in june haha good luck
Did the Irish fastly convert because imperial reminded them of Britain
@@gamermapper actually we converted at exactly the same time the UK did, way later than most other places
@@lizardlegend42 Well, we've gone further than the UK. They still use imperial distances on roads. We converted to metric for distance yonks ago, and to metric for speed limits more recently. (Yes, there was a time when distance was given in km but speed limits were in mph. That's what I grew up with.)
Great video. I'm a UK-based Engineer and would never dream of measuring or calculating anything in Imperial units. But as you point out - Imperial units are innately intuitive and that makes them particularly suitable for estimation purposes. My main objection is the US pint being smaller than the UK pint, which means that a visit to the pub when stateside can be somewhat disappointing :)
"Imperial units are innately intuitive"
How?
Why?
For whom?
@@dampaul13 inches and feet being based on human ish scale is kind of ice tbh (I AM A METRIC USER)
Engineering calculations with mixed units can get pretty rough, especially when mixed-system metrics like “BTU/kg” exist
British thermal unit is one ugly bastard. Energy needed to heat one pound of water by one Fahrenheit, which should be obscure by now but isn't really that bad in itself. The real irritating part is that it's almost one kJ, but not quite close enough to approximate that it's exactly that. I guess it's nice that water is used instead of barley seeds though.
@@wombat4191 scratch that. Any unit that use and combine both is one ugly bastard.
The BTU is really infuriating because its a unit of energy but people (hvac companies, heaters, ect) treat it as a unit of power. A heater is rated at say 1000BTU but doesn't say if it will take 1yr or .5nanoseconds to deliver it. (Its usually BTU per hour but could easily be per day)
And for metric's black sheep the metric ton is precisely 1000kg which is just the next prefix up of megagrams (Mg). If we can use micrograms which are the same factor except going down and not up surely we can just use Mg as well.
@@jasonreed7522 I don't think giving Megagram another name is that problematic in itself. And Mg would be often mixed with mg anyway, which could get quite annoying. The name ton is so widely recognised that people generally know it to mean 1000 kg or approximately that, so having a custom name isn't that bad.
But that "or approximately" is the problem. Ton, or tonne, has multiple versions, which all are close to a Mg, but only the metric one is exactly it. That causes way too much confusion.
I got annoyed by the metric ton thing in a climate science class that was using all sorts of units like metric tons, million metric tons, kg, ect and i was so confused and looked up the definition of a metric ton and realized it was stupid to use in science. (I get trades people used to tons and tonnes but scientists? Really?)
And the ton is an American unit for 2000lbs (sometimes called a short ton), the tonne is a British unit that nobody should be using, and the long ton is pretty obscure. Basically ton = 2000lbs, metric ton = 1000kg, all others are irrelevant.
I think a good backup to the point that "it seems like feet were designed with measuring people sized things in mind" is that even I, a British metric user, would describe myself as being 6 feet and 2 inches tall, and not 1.88 metres tall
I still prefer meters.
6 feet and 2 inches can be 1.88 meters, but it can also be more or less. If I want to be more accurate in metric, I just add another number. How would you do that in imperial?
@@martinsriber7760 You know we can put a decimal point in our numbers too, right?
@@a_dudethefirst7918 don't we actually do inverse powers of two fractions of an inch? half an inch, quarter of an inch, 8th of an inch, 16th of an inch.......?
@@derpinator4912 aye that we do, but if he really wants to add another number ye can.
Fun fact: in the UK at least, Google maps (and alternatives) say your turning is in some miles, and then it does, indeed, suddenly become yards. It is habitually a source of great distress for me on new journeys!!
Also, I sometimes, genuinely and non-ironically, use barleycorns and poppyseeds as units of measurement as they are for (UK) shoe sizes I believe: one size bigger is for feet one barleycorn longer :)
Google maps also gives driving directions not walking directions. With one-way streets it can be a long walk.
@@jasonwiley798 Google maps can be made to work for walking and I believe cycling(though I have never tried). Also pretty sure it can be set to work in K. meters, but again I don't use that.
@@stephenlee5929 Yes, there is a setting for nagivation on foot.
Interesting, US maps apps switch to feet under like 0.2 miles.
@@MTM358and I really wish it didn’t bc idk how far 100 feet is when I’m driving
I really like this video, you did a great job explaining yourself. I also think it explains the REAL reason that both systems are still used in conjunction today, feet and inches are convenient for human-shaped things. One thing you didn't mention is how they're good units for approximating, since they're based on a human thumb, a human foot, a 1/6 or a 1/5 of someone's height, etc. I use metric almost always in my life for things that require accuracy, but when I'm trying to ballpark a short distance, I almost always end up using imperial.
I know how long a centimeter is, I know how long a meter is... but most objects are smaller than a meter, and centimeters are so small, it's hard to visualize putting dozens of them front to back in my head. I know 30cm is approximately a foot, and an inch is approximately 2.5 centimeters. If my goal was complete accuracy, I measure and write in metric exclusively. If I need to approximate the size of something, I use imperial and convert to metric if necessary. I'm sure if my culture used exclusively metric I might be more comfortable approximating in metric, but we always use imperial for height, doorways, widths of a corridor, someone's weight, etc. It's a human-sized object, so we use it for things involving human proportions.
Grew up in the 60s in Australia. Initially taught pounds feet inches (& rods, poles, perches, furlongs etc). A couple of the teachers pointed out that the big units were usually able to be divided readily by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12 etc. Coming from the age before calculators (ie when Dinosaurs ruled the planet) there was no mystery to weird big numbers that were seemingly difficult to divide.
This is particularly true of volume measures. Tablespoons, ounces, cups, quarts, gallons are mostly base 2 (with several measurements that are no longer in use like the gill).
I gotta say though, the relation between volume of water and weight in metric is surprisingly useful in everyday life, just because so much stuff is mostly water or close to water in density.
However, I totally agree with you on how handy a foot is. I wish there was a metric unit that's around 1/3 meter. And converting is rather easy. However, tell me a mountain is 13,000 feet high or whatever and I have no idea how much that is, funnily enough.
Conveniently, one fluid ounce of water weighs one ounce. Alternatively, one pint is one pound.
"A pint's a pound the world around"
Alright Who The Hell Was Putting Their Feet In Mount Everest On Top Of Eachother The Entire Way
@@tissuepaper9962 I'd say you haven't been to a pub in awhile... oh you mean the weight! Why yes, a pint of water does weigh _about_ a pound. And a fluid ounce of water weighs _about_ an ounce. But at the same level of accuracy, a pint is half a liter and a pound is half a kilo, so why even go imperial in the first place? ;)
Dangit Americans getting to make us use feet for aviation, at that level of thousands of feet there’s little convenience over using metres…. Though of course the reason why feet are used is because that’s the system up in the air
An interesting use for inches are standard pipe diameters. It's definitely easier to talk about a S40 pipe with nominal diameter of 4 inches (which has OD of 4.5 inches) in terms of inches (which we usually convert to cm anyway for line sizing)
BTW would have loved a more in depth look on the mass units as well
@Вероника Заглотова Yea, forgot to mention why I like it as a standard as it is easy to visualize inch measurements than cm measurements sometimes
@@bajelman that is probably because you're used to it. I'm european and I can more easily visualize metric pipe diameters.
@@JoQeZzZ Wish I can visualize metric more. Growing in my place, I was always in a mish-mash of both imperial and metric units but as time goes on, I visualize in imperial but compute in metric!
Useless fact of the day: several sizes of water pipes in China has their origin in inches (of course defined in metric now) but are customarily named with Chinese units. I am not sure why this was done, but the fact that a _cun_ was about 1.26" (pre-1929 definition of 3.2 cm) means that people can just treat every 1/8" as 0.1 _cun_ and convert fractional inches to decimal _cun._
Looks like I'm 9 months late to the party, but since people are still commenting, here's a few thoughts (which were likely covered in the previous 7.52 kilocomments by the current counter):
1 - Although the video treats the nautical mile (nmi) as some strange appendage to the USCS, it's actually insanely useful to anyone who navigates by air or sea. 1 nmi = 1 minute of latitude. So your chart always has a baked in scale if you have lat / lon markings on it. Same applies to knots (nmi / hr).
2 - lots of people cite fractions as something implicitly wrong with the imperial system. But there is such a thing as decimal inches. You can even buy a decimal inch tape measure without looking around too hard. Also, humans are eerily good at eyeballing the midpoint of a line. If you know what an inch is, you can get to a 16th with surprisingly good precision.
3 - Using N-m as a unit of torque sucks if you're wrenching on stuff instead of designing it. I know what 15 lbs feels like and most wrenches are about a foot long. So it's easy to guesstimate 15 ft-lbs is. And I know what a kg weighs, roughly, so that wouldn't be bad, but who the hell knows what a Newton feels like?
4 - If you think that all metric units are convertible by powers of 10, I'd like you to take a look at your watch....
What you mean is that we need a new system with the nautical mile as its base...in base 12. 🤔
Also revolutionary France tried to make a 10-hour day and a 10-day week, but they realized that the peasants would slaughter them all very soon if they kept that up!
The second is not a metric unit, it is an SI unit, but that does not make it metric. If it were metric, it would be decimal time.
Also for point 3, pounds per square inch is much more intuitive for pressure than atmospheres.
I agree with 1 but:
2) Decimal inches exist yes but feet is still 12 in not 10, Its not uniform
Metric is.
3) It comes to what you are used to, If you always used to N-m then it wouldn't be too hard and infact the opposite will be true, So if both can be used without problem, Use the better one.
4) Time & angles are not metric! For time the second is an actual SI unit but hours, minutes etc. aren't. There does exist metric time where: 100s = 1min, 100min = 1h, 10h = 1d, 5d = 1w, 25d/5w = 1mon, 10mon = 1y (definitions vary) but all this hasn't been implemented.
Interms of angles its a fight between Radians (more mathematically useful since units of π are used) and Gradians (more metric since right angle=100°)
Radians are very commonly used but for common use they are kinda terrible but gradians haven't been much widespread
If a big push is made then metric time and gradians could succeed but it'll be too much effort.
As someone who has worked with fabric, being able to work in base 12 is a huge blessing. I almost never need to divide by 5 or 10, but often need to divide by 2, 3, and 4.
10 can be divided by 2 as well, but it's great that works for you
This is the blessing of english units. They were developed by hand workers.
@@Axelovskji but cannot divided by 3.....
@@Chronostra What do you mean? A meter divided by 3 is 33.3 cm.
@@adam-k that's exactly it. You get a fraction.
That's also the reason globally adopted time system is sexagesimal and not decadecimal, you know.
Actually, converting between km and m is pretty common. For example, a toll road marker usually gives a distance between current location and the start of the toll road in km and m subdivision. Like: 72km 600m
That's just 72.6 km.
The Federal Aviation Authority has proclaimed that a "Statute Mile" equals 5000 feet,
as far as "runway visibility range" is concerned, this is a 5% rounding error.
Please don't make a similar rounding error on your tax forms, the IRS expects higher standards.
Do you have a source for that? 'Cause I'm pretty sure that's not true. American aviation rarely (if ever) uses statute miles anyway. It's pretty much just feet and nautical miles.
@@Milesco we use statue miles to measure visibility and is what we list on METARS
@@Milesco aeronautical information manual 5-4-20 subsection b should be listed as approach and landing minimums. As a general rule visibility is measured in statute miles and rvr conversion values are kind of inaccurate. it threw me through a loop during my instrument training but when you’re determining visibility with the naked eye the imprecision of the chart is not that important and it’s more like, “yes I can see at least *prescribed visibility minimum*”
As an American, I would use Metric if there was a foot-like unit that is actually useful at a human scale. It’s so frustrating to me how you have to choose from too detailed or not detailed enough. Also would be nice to have an inch-like unit, but not as important.
As a side note, my school did teach metric and its fairly common. Centimeters are used daily and I see yardsticks instead of metersticks pretty often
two things to add:
1. There's nothing stopping you from using SI prefixes with customary units if it's useful to you, e.g. kilofeet = 1000 feet
2. If you want to have units more similar to customary units as part of a metric system, you can define new units that are similar in size but provide a more convenient conversion factor to/from metric, e.g. a metric foot can be exactly 30cm, if you want to keep conversion factors, then a metric yard would be 90cm and a metric inch 2.5cm or 25mm
ksi is commonly used in engineering for stress/strain. It is kilopound-force per square inch and is about 7 MPa.
hmmm... I think units that are close but not quite close enough to ones of a similar name are an even worse idea than having units completely different from each other.
MEGAFEET (Mft)
@@emilyhockers1086 That'd be 1 million feet, or 304.8 km, or about 189.393939 miles
The imperial Metre = 40 inches
The imperial Kilogramme = 2lbs plus 10%
The Imperial Litre = 2pints minus 10%
works for me :)
Even the metrics units that are now pinned to a universal constant, clearly show their 'arbitrary' origins, by not being integer ratios of the plank constant, the wavelength of hydrogen, etc.
Tbh the advantage of metric isn't that it's _objective_ but that it's more _universal_ among humans.
Every human drinks water daily, but not everyone interacts with barley corns.
integers aren't objectively more arbitrary than decimals or irrational numbers. Even using universal constants is entirely arbitrary; just because they're fancy science numbers doesn't make them practical as a daily-use measurement system. All measurement standards are inherently arbitrary. There's no reason a meter couldn't be a hair's width longer or shorter, and preserve the elegance of the metric system.
Just because it's arbitrary doesn't make it bad either. The benefit of having a standard is that everyone agrees on the exact definition of measurements, and that's worth making it arbitrary.
It is defined by what people in the French revolution could measure/estimate, the length of a North-south line from one of the poles to the equator was 10 000 000 metres
@@edwardbrown3721 it dosn't really matter what the starting measurement is from originally, just that we know what it is and can measure it with a universal constant.
And that gives you a sense of superiority?
Speaking as someone who grew up with celsius, I've never understood the fahrenheit is more intuitive thing. I can tell at a glance when I look at the temperature if it's going to be freezing (below 0), f*cking cold (0-5), cold (5-10), pleasant (10-20), hot (20-25), f*cking hot (25-30) or boiling (anything above 30) and that's all you really need to know.
PS I pulled the numbers and scale out of my ass (and rounded down to the nearest 5 since it doesn't really matter), don't come at me
Fahrenheit has the advantage of being in abase scale which is more appropriate for humans.
Like 100 is a big number, it takes a while the count there, but 30 is still quite small in terms of time to count or years to have lived.
And it’s easier to round since you can say ‘70s’ or ‘20s’ to describe temperature rather than needing to actually give the specific number or be vague about the actual temperature.
I’m not saying Celsius is inconvenient, but it is less convenient for talking about weather than Fahrenheit.
@@jameskowanko7574 what I don't get is why ya'll bother saying the degrees at all, if someone asks the weather we just say it's boiling out, we don't day it's in the 30's (or I guess the 90s in your case)
@@rooislangwtf we say the degrees since it’s something which is easy to do in our system
As someone that grew up with Fahrenheit, those numbers are not useful for me. Where I live, I need numbers from -20 (-28.8 C) to 0 (-17.8 C) because those are semi-regular temperatures for part of the year. When I look at the temperature, I see really f'ing cold (-50 (-45.5 C) to -30 (-34.4 C)), f'ing cold (-30 to -15 (-26.1 C)), cold (-15 to 0 (-17.8 C)), below freezing but not that cold (0 - 32 (0 C)), chilly (32-45 (7.2 C)), bring a jacket (45-60 (15.5 C)), fine unless you're in the shade (60-75 (23.8 C)), pretty warm actually (75-90 (32.2 C)), and ugh I'm melting (90-115 (46.1 C)).
I think part of the reason that the US refuses to use Celsius in particular is that temperature varies a lot more here than in most of Europe. In the upper Midwest and eastern Northwest temperature records are colder than most of Europe and in the Southwest temperature records are hotter than most of Europe. As a result, it helps to use Fahrenheit to be more specific about when exactly temperatures become dangerous, and not just as far as weather but also for things like fevers.
We also say the degrees because they’re useful. You don’t have to use decimals to express the kind of nuance between, say, different rooms in the same building. 69-71 is a perfect temperature (for me and a lot of people). In an office, people often get mad if you dial it up or down a single degree. We get human levels of precision without decimals. On the other hand, for things like, yeah, choosing what to wear for the day, we can make broader statements like “70s” or “low 70s.” You often see people getting more granular at extremes (low 90s, high 10s) and if it’s past the 100 threshold, below 0 or above 100, you know it’s genuinely dangerous to go out unprepared.
As a metric system user I would like to say that we do have a human sized foot equivalent. The school ruler (~32 cm).
There is one thing we can all agree, and that is units of time in Imperial are very good
Metric time fell out of use for a reason ;)
They aren't
@@finngardiner5358 and that is because, unlike with most other systems of units, all of Europe and their colonies used 60 seconds for a minute, 60 minutes for an hour, 24 hours for a day. Meanwhile, other systems of measurement varied massively from region to region - especially France, which was the primary impulse to create metric in the first place
@@vulpes7079 I'm not saying the impulse to standardise was bad, I'm saying base 100 was a bad choice to do it with
@@finngardiner5358 which isn't really the reason metric time failed to catch on
It's probably worth mentioning that Fahrenheit is a little more widespread than the rest of the imperial units. I've been to Europe multiple times and I've seen Fahrenheit signs every now and then.
I would argue that miles, gallons, pints, feet, inches, pounds are far more widespread than Fahrenheit.
What countries, and why were there signs about temperature?
@@cfor8129 Mainly Spain, the UK, and Italy. And they were those electronic gas station signs that display the temperature
time is the most widespread but i’m not sure if it counts
This video informed me that I have unknowingly been using "spans" to measure stuff for years. When I played warhammer as a teenager, I used the length from my thumb to little-finger (which I knew was about 7 inches at the time) as a quick way to estimate distances, especially in cases where it was against the rules to pre-measure.
Since then I've been whipping out my span whenever I need to measure something and don't have a tape measure on me (i.e. most of the time).
Your chart made no reference to an olympic sized pool, which is apparently the standard measurement of volume for the news media.
in defense of stone (not stones, idk why but the plural is stone): they're only really used for weighing people, and they're convenient for human-ish weights in the same way that feet are convenient for human-ish heights. most people are on roughly the order of magnitude of 10st, so weights in stone are fairly intuitive to work with as long as you don't need too much precision
Sometimes I go out of my way to use stone even though I'm American. Makes me feel old-timey and such. I like seeing the looks people give me when I tell them I weigh 16 stone. Doctors and nurses have given me the most rewarding stares of confusion.
@@tissuepaper9962 Stone doesn't pop up too much in the US and if it did, people wouldn't know what it is. I know this because on the December 1st, 2021 episode of Jeopardy!, the $2000 clue in Weights and Measures was essentially this is the number of pounds in a stone. Triple stumper, no one even tried to ring in, not even the 10-time reigning champ.
You can find hidden stone-based measures, though. Ever wonder why a jockey and gear weighs 126 pounds? 119 pounds and 7 pounds of saddle and gear? That sounds like 8.5 + 0.5 = 9 stone to me!
In college, I used to throw the 35 pound weight during indoor track and field. 2.5 stone!
Got an old anvil? It might have the weight stamped on it in pounds, quarters (28 pounds or 2 stone), hundredweights (112 pounds or 8 stone). Bigger items like church bells will even be marked in (long) tons (2240 pounds, 20 cwt, 160 stone).
Congrats on weighing a tenth of a long ton!
I remember it's 2240 since 14×16 is same as 15×15-1, and that times 10.
@@Rack979 wow, I'm seriously surprised that Jeopardy people don't know stone.
This is a really good video and does a great job of providing an objective take on a topic that a lot of people have strong opinions on. I can definitely see this being linked in online arguments for years
The best thing about imperial measurements is that at one point we had a unit called a Butte so a butte-load was 126 gallons.
We still have a barrel size called butt…………it’s bigger than a puncheon which is bigger than a puncheon.
When I worked as a cellar man in a hotel I learned……Firkin, Kilderkin , Barrel, Hogsheads, Puncheon and Butt. They were old brewers and coopers measures.
Stavros
@@stevecallachor _"it’s bigger than a puncheon which is bigger than a puncheon."_
Wait....a puncheon is bigger than a puncheon? Are you located near a black hole? Because that's some serious warpage of spacetime there. _;-)_
a correction, the unit of temperature in the metric system is the kelvin, celcius is only used by non-scientists for practicality and easy conversion
Kelvin is S.I. but ordinary people in countries which use Metric units use Celsius. Celsius is more properly “Metric” than Kelvin, because it defined a range of 100 steps tied to physical phenomena within the domain of human experience. Kelvin is for chemists and physicists. It doesn’t try to fit neatly with Celsius because it must be tied to another phenomenon not simply related the phenomena which define the Celsius scale.
1. People don't make fun of the US system because it's arbitrary. We point out that dividing everything by 12 then 3 then 5 or whatever you do is complicated for complications sake.
2. People actually do use conversions from volume to dimensions and mass all the time, maybe not so much in the US because your system isn't built for it, so people don't use it and that becomes your perspective. But if your system is built for it you do it all the time in industry.
3. Taking 18 minutes to explain that 1 system is better than 3 to 5 different ones mixed....well...yeah... that's exactly what we've been saying. You're repeating our argument and adding "but guys steps of 10 isn't great"....yeah, because so many people intuitively think in steps of 12, 6, 7 and 3?
This video doesn't mention the implications of imperial vs metric units on engineering calculations. As an engineering student in the early 1980's, I was taught both systems; here the superiority of the metric system couldn't be clearer, because metric system equations do not require conversion factors! In the end I wrote a computer program which handles dimensional analysis and conversions automatically, regardless of input and output units.
I'm nitpicking, but metric does require conversion factors.....but it's in 10 and it's linear.
But I agree tho, dimensional calculation in imperial (usimperial or ukimperial) is a brain smoothing procedure.
Converting mass to force in metric involves a conversion factor still. Ask anyone how much a kilo.of apples weighs. If they don't respond with 9.81 Newtons, their brain is stuck in imperial.
@@yazoink6690 mass and force are different units, so you can't "convert" mass to force. How much does 1 kg weigh on the moon? How about in space?
@@5tr41ghtGuy That's literally my point. If you ask for how much a kilo of apples WEIGHS, you'll get and answer in MASS, not FORCE.
@@yazoink6690 that would happen if the person who answered thinks that kg is a unit of force, which it is not. In imperial units we use "slug' as a unit of mass.
Very simple to be making that point about how feet and miles are not used together so it doesn't matter that you can't convert.
Meanwhile you ignore feet and inches, which you regularly have to convert between.
yeah but twelve is easy
It is entirely possible to work completely in Imperial units, although it can get weird due to what I assume is historical baggage. Pound-mass (lbm) vs. pound-force (lbf) vs. slugs come to mind. I've never seen anyone actually use slugs outside of a teaching setting in an engineering course, although I've worked in settings where gram-force (gf) and gram-mass (gm) were used.
Kilopounds and milli-inches (mils) do exist, and are a nice fun hybrid of unit systems. Less fun are units like grams-force per inch (gf/in), which occasionally come up with adhesives and blew my mind when I first saw them.
I use kips (kilopounds) and mils all the time in my work. It's an odd thing in petroleum because the worldwide standards all came from the US, so all of the equipment is odd in metric because they had to be converted. Now the standards bodies are trying to change the base to metric which is making a lot of weird standards like minimum plate thickness of .236" (6mm which was the closest mm plate size to .250" 1/4"). Also, we use barrels for volume and there are multiple different volume units for barrels so you have to specify bbls (oil) which equal 42 US gal (because there are different sized gallons in the world too).
In us engineering classes it's taught as slug not lbm
@@donald598 It's probably different in other disciplines like mechanical engineering, but the chemical engineering courses that I either took or was a TA for in the US nearly always used lbm rather than slugs. Probably because it's more convenient when talking about fluids and converting to other units like volume.
I don't know how long a furlong or chain is, but thanks to Pink Floyd, I know that an acre is the area of a rectangle whose length is one furlong and whose width is one chain.
I know this is an old video and nobody will se this comment, but I have such a huge beef with the Imperial system and the US because during college a lot of the textbook we used, even if they were translated to my language, kept the questions on the Imperial system, meaning I pretty much had to learn it to study
I see it. We do not use the Imperial System in the United States. We use the simlar US Customary units. It seems to me that if you are studying in a country which predominately uses Metric units, your beef should be with whoever chose the textbook for the class. The United States does not dictate how textbooks should be written, so there is no reason to blame the US. Just choose another textbook that is more to your liking.
7:20 As a surveyor, this makes me so happy to finally have an answer to a question I never bothered to ask.
What is the origin of a rod. They measure portages in rods for some reason
@jasonwiley798 I couldn't tell you the origin. However, it's just a unit of measurement in the same line as statute mile and chain. Supposedly the average canoe is 1 rod long. Call it a vestigial unit that still has some relevancy.
I do appreciate how easy the imperial measurement system is to factor into 3s and 4s, despite being worse in a lot of ways
So all we need to do is switch to base 12 numbering. Duh. ;)
@@toomanymarys7355 But that would destroy the metric system.
@@toomanymarys7355so... Use imperial? 12 inches is one foot...
@@SuperIsaiahbecause metric is flawed, despite what others tell you
I feel like it's worth pointing out that a nautical mile is actually derived from spherical geometry, and represents one arc minute of latitude.
Which I guess brings in a whole other problem regarding what geodetic datum is being used. Generally WGS84 is used for this.
Yeah, I actually like the Nautical mile. It is a very useful unit of measurement for seafaring navigation. When navigating around the earth then it makes sense to have a system based on it's circumference rather than the speed of light through a vacuum or whatever they use in the metric system.
I see what you barely touched upon is that different industries uses different units that are convenient to their industry. Science favors metric, architectural favors imperial (in the US), type setters have their own, explosives manufactures have their own, farmers have their own, shipping has their own, etc etc. There's no reason to get bent out of shape because some industry uses units you don't understand.
decimal inch is king
Even now that the metric units are defined in terms of universal constants, it’s still not any less “arbitrary.” The second is defined as some random huge non-integer number of cesium atom oscillations, since, like the imperial units, it was actually just defined in terms of something else and then redefined to make it more exact later
It is an integer number of oscillations, but it’s a super nasty integer that was chosen for exactly the reason you stated. 9,192,631,770. Why that number? Because metric was and still is just as arbitrary as any other natural system of measurement.
planck time as far as i know can be represented exactly in metric
what a nice video about the imperial measurement system, there's no way OP could be the target of fraudulent copyright takedowns from a swedish guy with a pokemon villain name
huh???
My favorite part of the mile is that it has 48 divisors. This means there are a LOT of options for dividing it evenly- which is useful for things such as road markers or light post placements. The US customary system is just a "more practical" subset of the metric system, and its America's best kept secret ;)
48 divisors isn't as impressive when you're a big number like 5280. The famous 5040 has 60 divisors: save 5% _and_ get 25% more dividing!
Btw, when you say subset, you actually mean superset
@@okuno54 While that is true, I would need verifying on this, but 5280 is most likely chosen over 5040 to most closely resemble the original measurement length. 5% is a large discrepancy at that length, after all.
And thank you. Although, my joke works a bit better with the implication of subset, in my opinion.
@@okuno54 5040 versus 5280 is actually a closer contest than you might think. It's not just a question of divisibility, but of useful divisibility. I personally support the 5040 mile, but is divisibility by a second three more useful than divisibility by a fifth two? And both numbers have a useless large prime (7 for 5040, 11 for 5280). I wonder if a number closer to 5,760 (1/7 of 5040x8) might be better (4,320, which is what we get if we swap the 7 for a 6 is probably too small)
oh god it feels so infuriating to hear every type of way to make fun of the imperial system being wrecked into pieces.
I love it, you made an amazing job.
Has it been? All the points against that system are still valid, he just brought up more points that are normally not brought up against that system.
To be honest, I feel like we are speaking different languages: you say “those are used in different situations: one’s for length and the other’s for distance” and I just can’t wrap my head around that as for me length is nothing but the distance between ends of something.
The imperial system makes perfect sense for a pre-modern mindset. You need to know how far it is to somewhere, and you need to know how long your field is, and you need to know how high to make a cabinet, or how tall a doorway needs to be, or how long a particular knife should be, but how often would you need to know the distance to somewhere down to the door-length, or how many knives could be laid across your field end-to-end? Never. You would never need to convert between those units in your pre-modern world. If something is small you have very small units to measure it with, but you would absolutely never use those same units to measure something extremely big like distance. So they develop as two entirely different systems.
It's funny you brought up that you never have problems with different units of measurement being arbitrary to eachother, I've had a couple times that I have container which I know the cm^2 of and can easily convert that to liters, that's what I assumed was a nuisance for Americans to deal with
The relationship between all of our standards of measurement is also something we're taught in primary school (in Australia) and I've found it useful my whole life
Ok? You realize americans use litres for displacements too right? look at how many 5.7l hemis drive around there lol
It's only harder for science based things. Or if you have to solve problems, usually in engineering, physics or chemistry. Granted that that's a very important part of our society, and the basis for the world as we know it, however the everyday normal american does not face these problems in a daily basis, and rarely has to convert things to make sense of them.
@@honkhonk8009 you guys use Gallons... Also you definitely don't use cm2
The inch is actually defined by the centimeter, per Machine Thinking.
The biggest thing is there's a system that everyone can use and everyone feels comfortable with. Everyone in the US understands imperial, and while most of us agree that technically metric is "better", I think switching is probably not worth it at this point. We all know imperial, and I believe we all learn metric in school (at least I did), why do we need to switch to another system? Whenever metric is needed I feel perfectly comfortable, but I just use imperial every other situation. It's just what I do, and there's no issue.
People really just need to get off their high horses and realize metric-superiority is just people trying to make themselves feel better about themselves for being more smart/rational. We should just coexist, and just be kind to each other instead of disparaging for random, arbitrary reasons.
P.S. I think the best advantage to imperial are the unit sizes being pretty convenient for human sized things, sometimes when I use metric it's easy to convert, but the measures I get always feel so clunky, like it was designed by a robot and not a human. Might just be the American in me showing.
Honestly yeah, the arguments for imperial vs metric is basically just pride at this point, like it really *does not matter* that one system is better or not because some people are just going to be more comfortable measure with inches or Fahrenheit or in meters or mL
If I had to deal with someone complain about about a measurement system I’d just say “tough, here’s the unit I’m comfortable using, the internet is free”
Metric will slowly creep more in the US, you can't stop that. By not doing anything, you just make it harder. Abolishing units of mass of volume should be fairly easy.
@@lkruijsw It doesn't need to creep in tho? We use metric. Fuckin done.
It's all well and nice saying that, if in a persons life the units will only ever trip you up a few times, a few conversations, a few miss judgements.
The issues arise when people need to be accurate. Rockets have historically crashed due to wrong measurement inputs from people using what was 'intuitive' to them. Manufacturers need to pile into one system or another depending on their market and simply cannot produce for both, and that applies to every single industry; plumbing, consumer goods, mass food production, meteorology, trade.
Having different measures creates so many design and planning landmines that have to fall one side of the other. You'll see many Canadians here complaining their recipes and ovens are all in F while none of the other systems use it.
All this without even getting into the mess that British imperial is orders different than American with completely different pints, gallons, tonnes/tons and more that I simply do not know since I've yet to have the misfortune of being completely confused to an unexpected difference.
@@ddfb494355 look, I just want to say that THE US FULLY USES METRIC FOR ANYTHING OF ANY MAJOR IMPORTANCE. yes there were issues when we were in the middle of switching over, but thats not imperial's fault, but the fault of switching between systems...
Happy abolishment of the survey units 🎉🎉🎉
The survey foot isn’t abolished, it is obsolete. That means that it should not be used for new surveys. There no doubt exist old survey documents done with the old foot, however. If new survey work is required on land so surveyed, the survey should be redone.
The whole "human scale" thing is probably the argument that most irks me. What a "human scale unit" is depends on which system(s) you grew up with. As someone who grew up with the imperial systems, you find feet to be human scale; I just find them weird. Similarly, inches seem too imprecise for small things. Similarly, I find degrees celsius to be much easier than Fahrenheit, because I grew up using it and I know what x degrees celsius feels like. The "comfortable temperature range for a human" would have been nice if it was in any way consistent between different people, but someone's comfortable temperature range depends on - you guessed it - where they grew up, and what the temperature range there was.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the units you grew up using seem to be a reasonable scale, because you already see the world in those units. They will not seem comfortable to people who grew up with different units.
Except yards. Yards are fine.
I'd like to say something about Fahrenheit it's good for weather, since 32 degrees is freezing (depending pressure) but not that cold, 0 degrees was based on a chemical formula, and weather doesn't typically get below 0 Fahrenheit by more then 10 degrees in missouri (a central state), further 100 degree Fahrenheit is close to body temperature (was later discovered to be 98) which weather plays a role, so I know if it's at the same of basically the same as body temperature outside it's going to almost scientifically feel hot.
@@swampdonkey1567 Once again, this depends on the temperature range where you grew up. I grew up in a hotter climate, so I can't even imagine what 0°C (32°F) would feel like. I already find 12°C (~50°F) "that cold", because I am not as used to it as you seem to be.
I think any sweeping statements about how cold or hot temperatures are will always be wrong for someone, and likely many people, because those terms are very subjective and relative. That's precisely why I dislike these arguments - it's nice that you find certain temperatures comfortable, but it's not a good basis for a measurement system.
by human scale, they do not mean easy. If i practice at one thing to make it easy to me, that does not make it easy for everyone else
@@Pencfun What do they mean by human scale, then?
I'm an avid supporter of the customary units. I guess you can expect that from someone born and raised in the United States. However, I am also an engineer and the metric system makes math really easy. My philosophy now is: metric is fantastic for standardization in scientific efforts and other international agreements, but regular people need something people-sized. All of the customary units are people-sized. (Except, like, mile, but whatever, it's all the same.) Even temperature is people-sized! 0 is very cold, 100 is very hot. It's almost like percentage hot. Almost.
I would prefer a new, better system of people-sized units, but instituting a new system of units is just too much effort, especially when the current system is just fine.
In my experience, a mile is easy to approximate as "the farthest I can see on flat, unobstructed ground". I'm a huge believer in the practicality of Imperial units, and I can think of immediate household references for all of them. Kilometers, though? I can't think of a single standardized object or building layout of that length.
I feel that the argument for imperial units is more cultural than anything, apart from the converting job, which would be massive.
No that's the thing! I have a job where we work in both imperial and metric units often. Unloading and loading materials and stuff. The ONLY math I have to do on any given day is when I need materials in metric units. And that is not to convert inches into centemeters or pounds into grams. It's litterally only metric units into other metric units.
The way most imperial units work is 'i need one of this big chunk, and three of this smaller unit.'
While metric units are 'i need x of this. So i actually need x in this kilo/decca/whatever unit. But then I need the volume and not the weight, which requires more math.'
Imperial units DON'T need conversions 99% of the time.
@@bikinibro I think you not being able to divide and multiply by ten is a you problem buddy
yeah the cost in materials alone would be quite large admittedly you would have to stagger it but you are talking about pretty much all educational material referencing measurement, any maps, and all road signs listing distance again, this could be staggered and the maps wouldn't be a major issue but school books aren't cheap and signs are even less so, not to mention the man-hours involved in getting all the road signs changed and mile markers swapped out.
Big words for the simple people, it's obvious it was preserved with the average american in mind.
@@bikinibro Yup, that's the great secret of imperial. The units are practical, readily discernable, and easy to work with. I don't care how well designed the metric system is supposed to be; it's excessive, unwieldly, and inefficient in day to day life. It's also way to easy to fuck up a calculation by misplacing a decimal point. Imperial lets you know when you've fucked something up but metric just buries the error until it's too late.
11:39 This is a very good point. The foot is a measurement designed to measure human sized things. It's a very convenient unit of measurement. The meter is too freaking big to use most of the time in casual conversation. Why do you think we almost never use the yard, outside of football fields? Because it's too big the convenient for talking about things that are portion to human beings. The metric system has that problem in spades.
"How tall is that person?"
"Um, well more than one meter, but certainly not 2 meters. Hmmm, maybe like 1.37 meters?"
It's just awkward. Whereas in the imperial system, in casual conversation, you can estimate things in feet more quickly and easily.
I know, casual conversation is not what the metric system is designed for - I've done physics and seen how annoying it is to have to convert imperial units. I know, I know. But a big part of why the US doesn't want to switch, is because everyone would have to spend a long time learning a new system which is not as useful in everyday life, apart from doing math (which most people don't need to do that often).
Also also, it's just a flex to use a measurement system no one else does: we don't NEED to. The world runs on our time, so we can be as backwards and weird as we want. Everyone else needs to deal with us, not the other way around.
Hmm, I don't really understand what's hard about saying someone is 1,4 meter tall? Americans use a decimal for stating the height of people too
@@nschwerte8324 Nope. We use feet + inches.
@@nschwerte8324 Canadian here - I have no concept for how big 1 metre or 1 cm without physical aids. Feet are much more natural.
For heights most people are between 5 and 6 ft so if someone is 5'11" and your 5'8" they are not noticeably taller. 1.6m vs 1.675m doesnt seem like it should be noticeable. I find some tells me their height in ft + inches I have an intuitive understanding but if told in metres I need to mentally convert to ft+inches to understand. I was virtually only taught in metric at school too (we covered imperial for things like construction).
@@christopherduvar 1cm is about the width of your index finger. A person is 2 m. It's clear, no 6 foot tall bs. Don't start with your 5ft 8 or 5ft9 bullcrap people are lying about to make them appear taller ( you know what I am talking about).
Yes, water is more objective then barley, because the mass a grain of barley can fluctuate wildly while water is a chemical substance with a pretty consistent volume. The only parameter that can have any significant effect on the density of water is temperature, with that effect being quite minimal, and easily accounted for.
omg I'm so excited for the imminent outphasing of the surveyt foot and statute mile after december 31st, 2022
My God. He did it. He hit literally every problem I have with the metric evangelists, including celsius.
He said it's not an argument for why imperial is better than metric.
@Mofo Haraam Moving the decimal doesn't do much. Though, I guess you can use an approximation like 30 cm!
@Mofo Haraam Does it though? You still have infinite threes and you are forced to use an approximation. However, metric is quite good ngl
@Mofo Haraam I mean, me personally, no. But scientists require an insane amount of precision, which is a problem.
@Mofo Haraam Metric is good *but* the thirds are *kinda* problematic. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Maybe we should have metric but in base 6 to solve the problematic thirds!
For the record as someone who grew up in a metric country, we usually measure volume by cubic meters or centimetres because decimetres is just 10 centimetres so the way I usually remember volume is that 1 cubic metre is is 1000L or 1 cubic centimetre is 1mL
dm^3 = litre is the GOAT
But we do use a pint to measure our intake of alcohol.....or a mega pint if you want for.....occasions.
It depends, we measure volume of liquid by liters, thus cubic decimetres, and space volume with cubic metres and centimetres. At least from my experience.
Bet you had some big ass punch bowls, soup pots, and baking ovens!
Japan had once its own unit system. "Sun" is like an inch, "Ri" is like a mile, etc. Some units like "Jo" is still used today, which is interestingly rectangular surface, based on standardized size of Tatami mattress.
Our government imported metric system in 19th century and banned traditional units in 1951. It's perfectly fine without legacy units and you'll get used to it.
china also has its own system, and some of the measurements are actively used (i. e. 斤, literally "axe", somewhere around 0.45 or 0.5 kg, i don't remember exactly
>banned traditional units in 1951. It's perfectly fine without legacy units and you'll get used to it.
And yet almost all rice cookers still measure the amount of rice to add in go, even when they're exported to the US and Europe. Sho also gets used for sake still as well. And apartment listings still let you know how many jo/tsubo a room is.
@@Evilmon2 shall we measure rice grains with milliliters? Or grams on scales? No, both doesn't feel right. Go is just go. Japan gets picky when it comes to food.
@@AngryCoward Agreed, and I think trying to forcefully change a people's ingrained and useful system of measurement is dumb and useless. Also a bit culturally questionable imo, especially considering how the spread of metric in the first place was primarily a political thing.
As someone with a 12in foot and who likes to cook I love the imperial system. I can very easily understand how long a foot is because it is apart of my body and when cooking I can easily scale stuff up and down cause it's so easy to divide by 2 and 4 for vol
yes dividing 200 by 2 or 4 is extremely hard, i dont get how people outside the US can live, do they always use calculator? also i dont have a foot so i dont know how long a foot is
Quick math problem. A 1mile bridge needs bolts every 3 inches a bolt how many bolts are in the bridge?
But now in metric a 1km bridge and every 2 cm a bolt. So the steps are 50 bolt in 1m so 50'000 bolts in 1km
@@simonw.1223 3 inches is 1/4 a foot. (Americans are very used to fractional measurements). 4 bolts per foot * 5280 ft per mile and you get 21,120 bolts. You missed the whole point of this video though. We wouldnt measure a bridge in miles to begin with. Lengths are in yards, feet and inches. Distances are in miles. You should be saying "The bridge is 5478 ft long with a bolt every 3 inches, how many bolts are needed?" You only need one conversion there, same as your metric example.
@@josh9673 ihhh okay. Well but the conversion could have some mistakes I think
As a physics student seeing the imperialbsystems measurements for pressure, volume, force,and energy, all just puss me of. Like when you have 5 gallons of something you need to specify US or UK galloon, or when you say you have 500 calories is it calories or Calories, same with lb are you taking about pounds of mass or pounds of force there is a difference. Finally what the hell is a bar and torr
Nobody in the USA cares about Imperial gallons, especially since the British have gone (mostly) Metric. Here (USA), the 5-gallon bucket is a common container. Nobody bothers to specify. We know what a 5 gallon bucket is.
Torr is key mm of Mercury. 760 mm of Hg is 1 atns or 101325. N/m2. 1bar is 1 atm