The red squiggly underlines make me sad.
God, I wish we used this here. It is such a better system than our system of potholes being measured in washing machines in some parts of the country.
What you’re too fancy to divide by 25.4 or multiply by .0397?
…1" ≈ 2 ½ cm, 5’ ≈ 1 ½ m, close-enough to convert in your head…
Me head has a dent the size of two small pollocks, or a couple elderly bonobo tits, if you like.
We do use it where necessary; in science, engineering and the military, for example. Some of our imperial units suck, but others, like pounds and feet and inches are superior because they are more intuitive. The reality is that it’s a non-issue for most people and because of that we will almost always have some version of a mixed system, as do most of the other Anglophone countries.
What? How is feet and pounds more intuitive? To me metric is more intuitive and imperials are whole another language, because I only learnt metric in school and only remember very few things in imperial (such as some dimensions on specific parts of bicycles).
Converting yards to inches in your head is near damn impossible, but you don’t even need to count to know 5.25km is 5250m or 525000cm
I’m an American and I approve this message.
Go to sleep!
I just awoke from 21ks of sleep.
This just made me think, why haven’t those damn commie Europeans with their fancy metric system come up with a better system for measuring time yet?
People like to talk a lot of shit about how subjective the definitions for an inch or a mile are, but I never hear complaints about how a second or an hour are antiquated and based on things that only make sense from an Earth-centric point of view.
I just feel like someone be mad at Americans for still using hours (ugh, trivially decided on the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate) and not something like the amount of time it takes for 1 kilogram of water to decay via natural radiation when under a vacuum.
By the way, before downvoting, this post is heavy with /s in case it wasn’t obvious.
Edit: I just looked up the formal definition of a second and it is “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom”.
It’s all so arbitrary is funny. People get so passionate, but then I’ll bring up,“Why aren’t we using Swatch Time?” Or, why don’t we have 13 months of exactly 28 days (With a bonus vacation day or two)?
They’ll usually fall back on what people are used to or tradition or something that just supports staying on imperial measurements. To be clear, I don’t give a shit what measurement system is used. It’s not like it takes a big brain to figure out what is going on when you travel.
Measures weren’t standard before the french revolution, so picking something and getting buy-in was easy. Time keeping was well established, and the French moved to a metric calendar, and proposals for metric time were made, but all were eventually rejected.
Honestly, that explains perfectly why America will never likely switch to the metric system.
It will happen because there is so much traction on metric, but it will be slow and both systems will be marked for a long time.
It’s deca, not deka
Not in German 😶
I don’t think I’ve ever seen thousands separators in decimals
The list isn’t even complete
Ronna/ronto quetta/quecto were added in 11/22.
American who just woke up… upvote cuz metric
Too early, back to bed with ya! *smacks with pan*
Where are the metric units? All I see is prefixes explained
My sibling in Satan, that’s the backbone of the metric system. Nobody said anything about units.
Gotcha, so we’re talking kilotons and microinches then?
Or is it actually the units that make the metric system scary to Americans?
Woodworkers use the “metric system” all the time it seems. “Thousandths of an inch” is a common unit.
Yep, I hear them referred to as “mils”. Although for more casual usage it’s far more common to use 1/x^2 measurements like 1/8" or 13/64". Thankfully my job has only really needed up to the 32ndth.
To further add to this, a unit would be something basic like litre, metre, or a gram. So 1000 litres is a kilolitre. 1000 metres is a kilometre. 1000 grams is a kilogram. You may be familiar with the computer byte. A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A megabyte is 1000 of those. Everything is divisible by 10, and everything makes sense.
Interestingly, even though a calorie isn’t a metric unit (the joule is), the energy to raise 1 millilitre of water by 1 degree Celsius is 1 calorie.
Also, 1 gram of water is 1 millilitre. And if you measure that in size, that’s 1 cubic centimetre. So if you go buy a litre of water, you know it’ll be 1000 cubic centimetres, and it’ll weight 1kg.
This isn’t the metric system.
Joke’s on you; I’m an insomniac.
And FWIW we use the metric system too. We just tend to mix it with US Customary, like how Canada and The UK does with Metric and Imperial. Except the UK uses more Metric than Imperial. Vice versa for the US. Food is sold using both. Science and computing are always in Metric. And a few other things too but it’s 4am and I’m too tired to think.
Edit: I don’t even know how a CPU’s temperature translates to Fahrenheit, but for weather it makes perfect sense. I know that 100°F is hot for outside, and that 80°C is hot for a processor. But I couldn’t tell you what is what if you swapped the measurements.
If you’d swap those, your CPU would be super cool and outside would be deadly.
That’s not what I meant but I appreciate the help, lol.
I meant that I don’t know how to read my PC’s temps in Fahrenheit and don’t know how to read the weather in Celsius. I do understand that 80°C would kill me, just not by how much.
Sleep deprived Canadian approves.
Damn, I did 2 years of physics studies but I never heard about atto and exa. Though I did spend a lot of time to try to memorise the other ones.
And then there’re the Americans who point at the Metric system and scream “why not us”. Which is anyone who’s sane and not afraid of change.
Americans
sane
I am by no means sane, but I’m all about metric.
Well in that case, please let me introduce you to the inch. I have a good feeling about this!
Please keep it in your pants, Ron
Here’s the deal; where metric use is necessary as in science, the military and engineering, we use it same as everyone else. As for the rest, most people really don’t care, so that’s why we’ll probably always have a mixed system. It’s just not a big issue for most people, sorry to say.
It’s just so confusing, the American system is so much better /s
As an American, I upvoted.
Edit: Wait, why am I awake at 5am?
