Lets
Boost screenshot, a fine vintage.
The imperial system (of length at least) has a very human basis. An inch is the first joint of your thumb, the foot is your foot, the yard is one step, a stride is two (step left, step right), a mile is 1000 strides. Normal walking speed is about 100 steps a minute, so a mile is about 20 mins of walking
The problem is when they generalized these distances, they apparently used the biggest guy they could find… It still makes sense for rough measurements, but I already use metric for anything small or precise. Or fast - I don’t even know what gravity is in imperial units. Kmph isn’t natural for me, but I think I could get there…I like 60mph being a mile a minute, it helps me estimate, but i could get over it
Weight and volume? I already use metric for everything but my own weight, because screw that nonsense.
Temperature? I’d like something more human scaled for daily use, I’ve tried getting used to it but metric just doesn’t click the same way. I like how Fahrenheit is roughly the livable range - below 0 is intense even with proper attire, and above 100 is dangerous even if you’re adapted to it. It’s not perfect, but maybe something like Celsius*2 for easy translation?
Anything not coming into contact with you, like cooking or cpu temp, would be better in Celsius though - things change around 100C
At the end of the day, I think it just makes sense to have more than one unit of measurement for certain things - one for human scale that is easy to grasp based on our bodies, and one for measurement.
It would be nice to say “I need like 10 feet of hose” and they give you 3.5 meters because it’s understood it’s an estimate, or you say “I need these boards cut to 2.75m” and they know it’s a measurement and give it to you exactly that.
And I would not miss it if volume and weights were metric only - i can’t tell you how many times I’ve converted teaspoons to ml or ounces to grams, maybe it’s because I learned chemistry before cooking but holy crap is that so much more helpful
It’s so nice the US and Liberia are the only two countries to share both Ebola AND the imperial system. They’re buddy buddy.
Myanmar uses imperial as well. At least partially. Or they did when I visited there a few years ago.
Oh I thought they converted. Or were converting. I don’t think they had Ebola though.
Must have, otherwise they wouldn’t use imperial. That’s what it’s for.
The US founded Liberia
So it did. TIL.
TBF in practice a lot of countries use the imperial system, from Canada to the UK to Jamaica to the Philippines. They just “use metric” on paper.
Also, here in the Netherlands we use inches for screen sizes and cups for some cooking recipes. I will insist that my monitor is 55cm and even tech people ask me how much that is with full sincerity.
Yes like I certainly measure flour in cups in Canada lol.
I noticed some Canadians seem to use metric exclusively, while others very much use imperial systems through and through. Android defaults to imperial systems when it’s set to Canadian English, which confuses me even more but I suppose imperial must be used a lot, then
I find stuff like cups and spoons and pounds and inches are used here more than metric, but we definitely use kilometers only.
Android lied to me
Maybe it’s a plot by the Australian government because it led me to set all my devices to Australian English; they’re always 100% metric
@lord_ryvan @BonesOfTheMoon, I don’t understand how it can be in the 21st century that a system as idiotic and archaic as the imperial one continues to be used. NASA has already caused millions of dollars in damage by crashing several probes due to miscalculations with these outdated and devoid of any logic measurements, based on parts of the body of a king, dead centuries ago instead of clear physical and mathematical units as in the rest of the world.
I also don’t get it and my country is slowly adapting it too (Netherlands)
I absolutely hate it and try to counter it actively
At least Raiden should’ve had no issues then
How long is that thing?
A foot.
How long is that?
About as long as a foot.
Oh cool, I have two of those to compare right here. Thanks for telling me how long stuff is in an easy to understand way.
What about that thing?
30 centimeters.
How long is a centimeter?
A hundredth as long as a meter.
How long is a meter?
As long as the distance light can travel in a vacuum in 1/299752458 of a second.
Please throw yourself off a bridge for using bizarre measurements developed by frenchmen.
Whose foot? Chances are yours isn’t even a good approximation.
Jokes aside, there isn’t even such a thing as foot anymore. All these idiotic measurement units like feet and elbows have thankfully been deprecated and are now simply a name for a certain amount of civilized units. Foot is exactly 0.3048 meters since 1959.
Whose foot?
Let’s go with Ariana Grande’s foot. The whole Ariana Grande is already used as a unit of measurement, so this will make the conversions easier.
+/- 20% is good enough for e6 and covers the overwhelming majority of men’s foot lengths.
For making a measurement without a tool +/-20% should be fine.
It’s all fun and games, but I take issue with calling metric “civilized units”. Human civilization developed all kinds of units appropriate to the work being done and calling the ones defined almost in defiance of everyday use the civilized ones is absurd.
Being able to easily convert between various units makes the metric system the only one worth considering civilized.
Every time I see a wrench labeled with some insane fraction like 18/32 my eye starts twitching. I honestly cannot tell which size is bigger without dividing and converting to decimal.
Human civilization developed all kinds of dumb shit we’ve since discarded. Please let’s discard the idiotic units in my lifetime.
I think you mean a 9/16. It’s be pretty crazy to see one labeled 18/32.
When you wanna make fun of sae use an odd number on top so no one can make fun of you for not reducing your fractions like a fourth grader. Or so you whip out 9/12 and get elementary school math mogged anyway.
How is it easier to convert between units under metric? I don’t have any use for a kilogram length of lumber or a meter of gasoline. What unit conversions are you doing?
Nah, my ruler has cm on one side and inches on the other. The side with inches actually, unironically, lists 1/8 through 7/8 in each inch, including 2/8, 4/8 and 6/8!
It’s not @[email protected] who is being dumb, the Imperial system is.
I can’t see what you described the sae side as because of a word filter, but I can guarantee a worse pejorative was used for people who chose that ruler on a job or worse, were assigned it in shop class. I think there’s a not for dumb people use for the unreduced scale but for the life of me I just can’t think of it.
Is that really the complaint, that people don’t wanna do fractions?
I called it dumb with stronger wording, but that was unnecessary and I’ve updated my comment to be more clear.
And yes, among many other reasons. The main complaint is that the systems uses many different conversions internally; 12 inch in a foot, 72 points in an inch, 3 feet in a yard, an arbitrary amount of yards in a landmile, and slightly more at sea… I understand this wasn’t designed deliberately, that imperial is really just 3 measurement systems in a trench coat. But that’s exactly the problem.
But also yes, I’d rather do 9 mm or1 cm, than 3/8 inch
0.9144 m is 3 feet
TY. I refuse to use idiotic units to such degree, my brain didn’t even flinch at completely wrong number I copy/pasted.
Actually that’s a modern measurement concept based on the original meter. By using this concept, the size of a meter is tied to absolute terms in physics that “anyone” could measure with the right tools, while the original concept was based on a physical object called the meter, which is subject to many things such as heat dilation for example making it not accurate, and if the original object was lost we would not have a way to tell what is a meter (conceptually speaking of course).
The foot on the other hand (lol) is traditionally based on the king’s foot size. This of course depends on which country (or realm?), and to make matters worst, who’s the king at the time, because yes the official measure would change based on that too.
Of course that’s not how it is today, but we can say the original foot was lost long ago.
Ditto for the original meter. We sure are lucky that an approximation of the measurement is built into the name of the foot. It’s frighteningly European to have a measurement name that roughly translates to “measure”
Hey, how many measures is that?
honestly curious, as someone that doesn’t intuitively know how long a foot (in terms of measure) is, does it actually compare to the average size of the average foot? Like if you say something is 2 feet long, can you actually walk 2 steps and that’s a pretty good approximation?
Its a tad low if you’re barefoot, frighteningly close when you have shoes on. For men’s average shoe sizes.
It’s a man’s man’s man’s foots world.
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That would only work for substances with a density of 1
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And eggs.
Yeah man, can’t believe some recipes go to 11.
Can’t they just make the 10 higher?
Yeah but these ones go to 11
Any baking recipe that doesn’t list all measurements by weight belongs in the trash.
mfw I finally find someone else who writes “250gr water” in their cooking notes
Fortunately water is the easiest thing to convert.
Seriously. Many ingredients are different depending on if they’re packed, scooped, or sifted. 1 cup of brown sugar can be very different than another cup.
I tried this with cocoa powder before, as I’ve seen some people in cooking videos shake the cocoa in the cup, and shake the cup to flatten it. And others scoop the cocoa with a spoonand flatten it with the spoon to fill the cup.
The second method yielded over 1.6 times the amount of cocoa powder!
[email protected] feels this in their soul
tespoons? That’s what tsp means?
Yeah what’d you think it meant, Eugene?
…ten square pounds?
Calzone explodes
Jazz music intensifies
WTF is a square pound!? You’ve ruined my day.
One pound times one pound, duh.
When you go at it harder than a trash compactor and your partner literally changes shape.
A square pound is when a guidance counselor who thinks he’s still cool goes in for a fist bump and says "pound it "
Chinas largest to smallest unit makes sense to me since it’s the same as Arabic numbers, largest to smallest, and so sorting order would also be same.
I do find cooking easier in grams. Just put the bowl on the scale and add ingredients until it hits the number. No measuring cups to wash. But it would life changing if woodworking switched to metric. Doing any sort of exact math is annoying as hell. What is 12’7” divided by 4? How many 1/8” is 0.55 inches?? It is my own personal hell.
It’s also a lot easier to multiply and divide recipes if you switch it over to metric. This is particularly useful if you don’t have enough of one ingredient and need to reduce the others by that ratio.
Then there’s the ability to measure the ingredient directly out of the container, using any scoop you can find, rather than needing multiple sets of measuring spoons.
Ah yes, I’ll have 0.8 metric eggs please.
A metric egg is a little over 50 grams. You typically get a bit over 30 grams of white, 20 grams of yolk and 5-ish grams of shell.
This is a rounding error.
Got to get the metric chickens for those.
Kek. 1.21 kilochickens
Interestingly chicken size is based on their weight… So a size 18 chicken is a 1.8kg chook
That’s a big mother Clucker for sure 🤣
Reminds me of the good old days when my dad raised free range fowl: the chickens were the size of turkeys and the turkeys were too big to even fit in the oven 😂
Sometimes I buy liquid eggs in a carton if I need a lot of eggs for one recipe and don’t feel like cracking a dozen eggs. One large egg is about 50g, so 0.8 metric eggs is about 40g.
Say you have a recipe that takes three eggs but you only have two. Do you wanna do the math on what 2/3 of one cup is actually?
Ummm… It’s 2/3 cup, and that is a standard measurement. But maybe that wasn’t the best example. Let’s say 2/3 of 1/4 cup. Well that’s 2/12 or 1/6 cup which is far from common. However a cup is 48 tsp, so 1/6 cup is 8 tsp.
I mean it’s dumb as hell but it does work.
The Metric system is easier though.
It’s like when the crazy guy says it’s easy and then pulls out a pinboard with pictures and string connecting them and proceeds to explain how it makes sense in his head and you have to admit that you sort of follow but also can’t believe what you’re hearing is reality.
You can just say you don’t know fractions.
It’s okay.
They used to give out a little conversion rotary slide rule at trade shows. Pretty nice tech, two circles of cardboard pop riveted together in the center, on the top one the units are written on a series of rings, smallest on the outside, biggest on the inside, there’s a cutout along the radius so you can see the numbers written on the bottom one. Spin the bottom one so the unit you know is showing and the one you want will be right there.
I bet they still make em.
As a previous hardware store employee in Australia I can confirm we were given these as well, as a lot of our tooling is still in imperial measurements - particularly bits, tools, fasteners and the like. I think my old one is still lying around in a box in the garage somewhere…
The thing that drives me bonkers is that ounces is both a volume and mass measurement, and they aren’t the same for water.
I do find cooking easier in grams. Just put the bowl on the scale and add ingredients until it hits the number. No measuring cups to wash.
Uh, you know metric has volume measurements as well, and Imperial has weight measurements? Measuring cup vs scales is not really a difference in metric and imperial.
Directions and nutrition information and other stuff like that tend to use mass for metric and volume for imperial. Yeah, you can convert stuff, but it’s annoying.
A litre of water weighs a kilogram. When asked for 300ml of water, I can add 300g instead.
That’s a good point, that does come in handy.
Okay now do oil.
It’s not often you get a recipe telling you to add 300ml of oil. But it sounds like a recipe I want to try.
Only at sea level. Cooking with metric in the Himalayan mountains would not allow for this conversion.
+1 point to imperial /s
I get around it by just working in inches entirely. If some guy needs the foot-and-inch measurement I’ll convert but generally calling for something to be 97 5/8" is sufficient, without needing to add feet into the equation.
I do agree that metric would be interesting. I have a metric tape measure I use when I am practicing botany so I can work on familiarizing myself with common metric distances like 10/100cm
Actually not accurate for “Rest of the World”, China uses year month day.
Which is the best date format for sorting stuff alphabetically.
Iso standard time
That’s also great, but unhandy for manual use. Imaging a folder full of files like:
2004-06-14T23:34:30+02:00_funnypic.png
04-06-13_funnypic.png is much better in that regard, but obviously is not that precise.
If you don’t butcher it like you did, ISO8601 caters for any amount of precision you need.
For the vast, vast majority of my usage 2023-07-23 is sufficient. If you need a time as well just append the time and the nice thing is it’ll still keep things in order (I’ve not found myself needing to use the timezone notation as well since I don’t usually share dates cross-border). For work I use the week notation a lot 2023-W30-4.
04-06-13 is not helpful because now I don’t know if you’re European and mean 4th of June 2013, or if you’re american and mean 6th of April 2013, or if you’re some weirdo who means 13th of June 2004.
These are the iso standard timestamps I regularly use in code, which are precise but unhandy. There is no butchering, it’s just one of the full standards.
As I said above it’s highly unhandy to use the full string. The shortened two digits version is fully sufficient when operating in a controlled environment, because you know what each pair represents. As soon as you go into the great unknown, you can’t say for sure what format is used anyway.
What we can definitely agree on, is that a standard process would help a lot, whichever it is. Preferably one that works well with alphabetically sorting.
You’re not at all required to specify a time
We are talking about the exakt same thing then. I really like standardized Date formats. They are always pain in programming languages.
That is a timestamp, not a date. 2013-06-13_funnypic.png is better.
Not funnypics but lets say your bills, stuff in your backup:
- dr.sowieso-2022-02-01.pdf
- dr.sowieso-2021-10-12.pdf
- …
Gets sorted by name automatically.
I also do because it is ISO standard. I also do 24 hours for time. I wish scheduling application would do that. I don’t know how many times I have scheduled a meeting for 8PM the following day instead of 8AM.
All of East Asia use the same format.
What china, isn’t year-month-day some iso norm?
Yeah, ISO 8601 or better yet: RFC 3339.
(You’re actually allowed to read the latter.)
Yeah, just saw that someone mentioned it already.
The A* paper standard and the metric system. A Pythagorean can dream.
And Celsius? And 24 hour time?
If we are doing this, shouldn’t we go straight to Kelvin? So we no longer have to deal with negative temperatures
So water freezes at 273 degrees and boils at 373? No thank you
Yes please
We use 24 h format here where I live but we speak in 12 h format because it’s less awkward. Not all that shines is gold, I guess
Computer, wake me up at zero six hundred hours!
That’s absurd, we just say “wake me up at six hours” and it understands us.
And “wake me up at 18 oʼclock” for the pm variant.
And “wake me up at 18 oʼclock” for the pm variant.
“At six” works in 24 hour time too.
I use 24h in speech, it trips up some people a little but they all understand and I’ve gotten a few to switch!
My native language is Dutch, but I to give an example I say “vijftien uur” for 15:00 / 3pm and “vijtien uur dertig” for 15:30 / 3:30pm. My closest English equivalents would be “fifteen oʼclocm” and “fifteen thirty”, really.
My point is, make the tiniest possible step, only replace the number of the hour with the 24h variant and drop the am/pm part.
What’s awkward about it?
When I was 6 in 1980, they told us we would be switching in a year or two.
Any day now
Just like daylight savings time…
We actually got rid of that in Denmark recently, but in a pretty foolish way: our time is now locked in on daylight savings time rather than the original unmodified time.
Probably gonna mean some dark mornings when the times come and we don’t switch back, which’ll suck for those of us who have a hard time getting out of bed before the sun’s up…
That was pulled back because the way that was passed in the Senate would have set a bad precedent.
I’d heard of that before so after a quick google America passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975 then in 1982 the Metric Board was abolished by President Ronald Reagan…
So like the harbinger of doom for American progress he was Regan killed it…
Yes and then they realized all the replacement parts for everything already built would still need to be imperial measures as a replacement fastner needs to be the same size. So we didn’t switch.
One is for eating tea and other for table.
We went from posting Twitter screenshots as memes to posting reddit screenshots as memes
That’s called progress, imo
Excuse me, I think you mean X.com screenshots.
