Really though, the most ardent defence of USC units is fuelled by great amounts of Copium. The US Customary set of measurements is several independent systems of measurements which often radically different origins and sometimes irrational conversions, all stacked upon each other and dressed in a trench coat. For instance, the mile has Roman origins while the inch and foot were defined separately, much later, and with a lot of regional variation. The French foot was longer than the English foot, which is why Napoleon was listed as 5’2" tall while he was actually closer to 5’9", or 1.71 m, which was pretty average for the time.
Which one of these is more straightforward to calculate:
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You are tasked with installing a rail along a 1 mile long bridge. You know you can use two half inch bolts to affix it every three feet. How many bolts do you need?
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You are tasked with installing a rail along a 1,5 km long bridge. You know you can use two M12 bolts to affix it every metre. How many bolts do you need?
Conversions within dimensions in USC require you to memorise arbitrary conversion numbers. Conversions within dimensions in SI require you to move the comma a few spots.
Besides, if the US Customary system of units is so great, why did most of the world voluntarily switch to SI units?
Good example with the Bridge, it’s exact the point with the USC units, source of fatal errors.
I don’t like the bridge example because the values were chosen (intentionally or not) conveniently for metric. Change it to every 4 feet or 1.3 metres and it’s no longer convenient in either system. There are better examples that demonstrate the superiority of metric.
For example, pool cleaner says 1 unit per 10,000 gal or 40,000 L.
21’ diameter, 3’ tall. So ~1000 ft³. Multiply by 1728/231 for gallons.
7 m diameter, 1 m tall. So ~40 m³. Multiply by 1000 for litres.
If you’re curious where 1728/231 comes from, there are 12³ (1728) in³ for a ft³. Then the gallon is defined as 231 in³
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I have to agree 100%. The slavish devotion of small brained regressive idiots to base 12 time keeping has bugged me for fucking ever. Swatch solved this decades ago, but people are too stuck in their “But this is what we’ve always used” bullshit mindset.
Base 12 is better than base 10. In an alternate universe we use it for everything and it’s a utopia. There is world peace and no one is hungry.
12 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. 10 is only evenly divisible by 2 and 5.
(Fun fact, Tetris in that alternate universe doesn’t have the stupid Z and S Tetronimos. People are happy there.)
I’m basically forced to know the good way, and the American way.
Yanks stop trying to claim things as your own.
For anything construction-scale, all supplies sold in the US are based on 4x8’ sheet goods and 16-24" on-center framing. I also concede that king George the 74th’s foot length is more human-scale when dealing with large measurements: 20 feet vs 6096 mm. I still use metric when possible, however - I find it easier and more accurate.
For EVERYTHING else I’ve switched to using metric.
Context: I grew up in the US using imperial units and only pivoted to the metric system in 2020. If I grew up thinking in metric and building supplies/standards used it, it’d be superior in every way.
TL;DR I like my imperial/metric combo tape measure.
6096 mm does sound really stupid when you could just say 6.096 m.
All plans use mm exclusively. Airport blueprints, for example, are in mm. At first blush it seems excessive, but it makes sense from a consistency & accuracy POV - 6.096m takes up 2 more characters than 6096 - they don’t even need to specify the units “mm”, because it is assumed, and anything else introduces room for error.
“Ok Bob, we’re going to build a runway, it needs to be 3,962,000 mm long”
I get angry when hardware uses imperial units because I can’t use my metric tools, which are way the fuck easier. Who wants to use 5/8" when you can use 16?
Metroids itt btfo, malding, fractionally mogged upon.
I’m terrified of driving the day they move the US from miles to kilometers. People go well over the speed limit as it is. I can only imagine how many people would read the kilometer per hour speed limit as miles.
England still has their speed limits in mph and all road signs are in miles and yards…
I had never considered this before, but you’re absolutely right
@Zerush Too much hassle to change to metric
But if isn’t.
- start by putting metric units next to the SAE units in the labels
- Eventually people get used to the units and then you phase out the use of them.
All science and most of the mechanical engineering is done in metric already. If you have a car made in the last 20 years ask the fasteners are already metric. So it really isn’t that hard…
We already do that. Looking at a bottle of tea I drank earlier today and it says 16FL OZ (473mL) both units are labeled on most things.
Ford still uses SAE bolts/screws for door panels, but not always.I only keep metric sockets and wrenches in my box, but have to keep a 1/4" socket just for the random Ford I have to work on.
With that attitude it will be. Just because it’s a hassle does not mean it’s not worth doing.
There are (huge) costs to retooling production to move from imperial to metric. Even if a company wanted to make that move they’d have to transition in phases and will likely end up with additional equipment to maintain. There’s also significant training for workers (who will likely commit errors in the beginning) which will impact production. And what happens to the old equipment? I’d guess a significant portion of that would end up getting scrapped and landfilled.
Perhaps I’m biased, but sometimes it’s easier to work in fractions. Also, setting room temp is objectively better in F. I can tell the difference between 74 and 75. That said, I’m also a scientist so I’m permitted these opinions.
No, you are not permitted these decisions because you are something.
Its still bias
You are a scientist who claims Fahrenheit is “Objectively” better than Celsius because you can “feel” the difference?
I really like Farenheit system for temperatures. 0 is really cold and 100 is really hot, but both survivable. It’s a human-centric system.
0C is the temperature that water freezes, which is good but temperatures more often go negative with that system. 100C is boiling so you’d be dead.
What’s so special about the 0 - 100 range? For either system, there’s temperatures that have significance.
-20 C is getting dangerously cold (wear all winter gear available if you must be outside for anything longer than brief durations).
-10 C is very cold (winter coat, gloves, hat).
0 C is freezing (winter coat necessary, gloves and hat optional).
10 C is chilly (winter coat unzipped, or jacket and sweater).
20 C is comfortable (t-shirt and pants).
22 C is about room temperature (shorts become viable above this).
30 C is hot (nude comfortable; minimize clothing).
40 C is getting dangerously hot (depending on humidity and personal heat tolerance) (clothing that protects from heat might be more desirable than minimising clothing).
F has finer whole number resolution for temperatures typically experienced by humans. Obviously C can be represented by decimals, but I tend to think whole numbers are clearer.
Personally I use C and metric for all my scientific work and F for representing outside temperature.
Edit: Phrasing
I honestly can’t say I need resolution finer than Celsius for air temperature. So many other factors have such bigger effects on the perceived temperature (humidity, UV index, if the sun is shining, wind speed, etc) that a granularity of 1°F doesn’t make sense to me.
Pool temperature, on the other hand, yeah, 1°F or 0.5°C resolution is perceptible.
I responded a few posts higher with more detail about this, but after teaching myself Celsius I actually prefer the lower resolution. A change of degree Celsius has more meaning than a change of degree Fahrenheit. (Also many, though not all, weather sources are using the Celsius values anyway and then converting and rounding them to Fahrenheit, so you don’t really get the benefit of that granularity.)
I really like Farenheit system for temperatures. 0 is really cold and 100 is really hot, but both survivable. It’s a human-centric system.
I used to make this argument, that Fahrenheit made more sense for weather, but I decided to be (somewhat) scientific about it and test the hypothesis (with a sample size of 1).
So I switched everything I own over to Celsius and set about teaching myself.
This was back in 2019, and here I am still using Celsius 5 years later. I like it a lot more than Fahrenheit.
A couple of major reasons: first, you don’t actually need the precision Fahrenheit gives you for weather. The difference between 68°F and 69°F is so small that degrees Fahrenheit have very little meaning. It was startling to me how quickly I came to understand the differences between degrees Celsius because they have a lower resolution. And of course you can always use half degrees if you need to, but honestly it’s fine without.
What I realized is that, very often, the temperatures that you see on weather reports or apps are really just the Celsius degree values converted and rounded. For example, you’re far more likely to see 68°F or 70°F rather than 69°F, since 20°C=68°F and 21°C=69.8°F. This isn’t true for every weather source, but it was still interesting.
But more importantly, 0 is freezing.
This never seemed like it mattered when I was using Fahrenheit. I know 32°F is freezing, if it’s below that it’s gonna be snowing instead of raining. But the first winter I experienced in Celsius was eye-opening.
I realized that temperatures below freezing in Fahrenheit never really meant much to me. This is sort of hard to explain, but while I knew they were progressively colder there wasn’t much specific understanding. That is, 23°F doesn’t really mean anything to me.
But -5°C? That instinctively meant something to me the very first time I experienced it in Celsius. That’s going to be as far below freezing as 5°C is above freezing. No math involved. Simple. Valuable. Obviously you can do the math to figure the same thing out in Fahrenheit, but with Celsius you don’t need to.
Once you get to know the numbers, it’s just as good as an other system of measurement, and I find I like it more for the weather than I like Fahrenheit.
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There are 8000 linguistic systems in use today, about 90 calendars, a few hundred legal systems, a few hundred monetary systems, but Redditors fume at the thought that Planet Earth uses >1 convention for weights and distances
I’ve read that it is more easily divisible than metric.
Divide a meter by 3 or 4 and get ugly numbers but a foot or yard divide by 3 or 4 quite cleanly. And so on.
Depending on your application this can be very helpful.
Divide a metre by 4 and you get 0.25 meters or 25cm
Dived a foot by 4 you get 3 inches.
Dived a yard by 4 you get 9inches
Metric here wins in my opinion.
Now let’s go by 3
1m by 3 is yes 33.3r not great but 1m is 100cm and that’s how it is.
1ft by 3 is 4 inches. Sure looks great now.
Except size resolution is far greater in metric in simple forms
Every inch is 2.54 cm obviously they dont round up nicely.
Once we have to go smaller than an inch we need 15/16s of a inch, smaller then a cm we drop down to mm.
10mm makes a cm.
In super practical terms i need a spanner, 16mm is to big, i get the 15 next.
5/8 is to big what do i get next?
(I know the answer)
Also another argument is well whats if you need half a mm etc we just use 0.5m or 0.7mm etc
Very small sizes for most everyone day to day.
Sure it’s not great breaking it too 0.whatever, but metric does it so much smaller as imperial made that jump to incorporate a size smaller then an inch.
1/4 inch is just 0.25 inches
Base 12 has factors: 1,2,3,4,6. Dividing by 5 is tricky.
Base 10 has factors: 1,2,5. Dividing by 3 is tricky.
I think this is it. The 5 factors instead of 3.
I also think there was something to do with fractions of an inch too. Like that divisibility was also an advantage of imperial.
Even these people who are screeching “decimal for everything!” in the thread still use dozenal for time, months, and cartons of eggs.
I was going to mention the base number issue but couldn’t be bothered, i had just only woken up
Try working in metric for any significant amount of time and you may change your mind.
Division no is the problem in one unit, inch, feet, etc, because use fraccions instead of decimls, but the problem is the conversion from inch, feet to others (yards, miles), which is the source of a lot of errors, like those from the Mars probes or some catastrophigs breaks of bridges in the past, apart of some problems in physics, because using for weught and mass the same unit. No, imperial are not human measures, never has been since humans count with 10 fingers.
It’s easier for handling real things.
Try doing woodwork in feet and inches for a day. Try it in metric for a day. You’ll see what I mean.
It was crafted for the human-scale, whereas metric was worked out on paper by French philosophers.
Human scale? Not yours or mines, measures of the ffoot, thumbs and random desires of a dead British King in the far past. No problem in metrics, at least if I don’t build a hut in the wood with an axe, then maybe using parts of the body for measures are usefull. Not the first furniture I made, also working in metal. Also in mathematic and physic the metric system is way better (Even NASA now uses the metric system since 2 probes crashed on Marte due to calculation errors in the imperial system)
Just wait for an American to tell you how it’s easier to use fractions with imperial. I’ve legit seen them say shit like 3/8 of an inch is easier to think about than 9.5mm.
Above having to add 3/8, 5/16 and 2/3 inch ¬¬
Quick off the top of your head, what’s a third of 9.5mm?
~3.2mm. I can’t think of any real world application which needs fraction of a millimeter which doesn’t include ah calculator and some damn exact measuring tools.
Quick off the top of your head, why would I use fractions of a cm instead of mm? It’s a workaround for a shit system
Well I’m building a table right now, and it was pretty easy to choose a size for a mortise and tenon in my 3/4" stock, a third of 3/4" is 1/4". If I wanted half its width, that’s 3/8". Mental math is a lot easier than “What’s a third of 19mm.” In the wood shop, I rarely have to divide things by five or ten. I have to divide things by two, three and four a lot.
I rarely have to divide things by five or ten. I have to divide things by two, three and four a lot.
I don’t know anything about carpentry, so I’ll take your word on it.
My best guess is that the standards are different. For example 2cm stock instead of 1.9. Then only the 1/3 is problematic.
I’m building a shaker table out of white oak. I milled all my stock to 3/4" thickness.
Just today, I resawed a board to 3/8", or half its original thickness. I glued two boards together to make 3/2" (1 1/2") thick table legs, and I cut mortises 1/3 the thickness of the stock, or a nice even 1/4".
I’m familiar with the metric system, I learned chemistry and physics in metric. I prefer woodworking in fractional inches because metric seems like a bigger pain in the ass
Quick off the top of your head
We are communicating through writing on an asynchronous web forum.
what’s a 1/3 of 1/8th of an inch?
1/24th.
Fractions of fractions are easy, just multiply the denominators.
okay then my answer to the hypothetical is 9.5/3, which is every bit as easy to find on any measurement device, or to use for any practical purpose, as 1/24th
Well I’m not the person who initially asked you that, I’m just someone who recognizes how easy it is to work with fractions.
Also I have a ruler with 1/12s graduations and while it’s not 24ths, my neighbor has one marked like that.
E: my drafting ruler has a short 24ths scale
I doubt it had much to do with kings, as they didn’t do handicrafts or have to measure things like grocers/traders do.
That image is really stupid, too much wrong with it to go thru.
I am willing to bet that you are simply more used to the imperial system.
I am not convinced that it has any objective advantage over the metric system.
My foot is about 50% larger than my SO’s, but I can perfectly invision 30cm whenever I want or need to.
Cooking too. Try baking a cake in the two.
Pounds-and-ounces is all like “two eights is sixteen”, “three threes is nine”. Nice and handy multiples is what it’s made on.
I’m about equally familiar with the two.
Woodworker in US here, and I prefer metric. Also consider the thickness of plywood is actually in metric now - “3/4” is actually 18 mm but they have to market it as 23/32.
I’ve chosen to join the other 8 billion people on earth.
Dude, WTF are you talking about? When I was a machinist it was so much easier to deal with metric. 1 inch ~ 25 mm, from there it is just way easier to deal with measurements such as 27.5 mm instead of 1 5/64 inches and all of these inverse powers of 2. I was always jealous of the French machinist I worked with talking about how the only units you should ever have to work with is meters and millimeters. If you are concerned about “Human Scale” then intuitively a meter and a yard are close enough for estimates and you don’t have to deal with “wait, what is 5/8 + 3/16 + 1 7/64?”
“wait, what is 5/8 + 3/16 + 1 7/64?”
Those are so easily commensurable! It’s 1 and 59/64 obv.
It’s set up to make this easy.
Let me ask: do you think people have usedit for hundreds of years for no reason?
Those are so easily commensurable! It’s 1 and 59/64 obv.
I legit can’t tell if this is sarcasm.
It’s redditor big-brain posturing.
“wait, what is 5/8 + 3/16 + 1 7/64?”
In binary it’s 0.101 + 0.0011 + 1.000111, or laid out vertically:
0.101 0.0011 1.000111 = 1.111011Halving numbers is no harder than decimating them, probably easier for most of us. Even computer scientists don’t think of base-10 as The Way The Truth and The Light; they use base-2 or base-16 for various things.
Decimal/base-ten is fine as a convention, but insisting that One Convention is perfect and others are heretical is stupid.
You do you, but if you’re reverting to binary to explain how simple it is to add values together, I think you’ve made a wrong turn somewhere.
halving is a really easy mental operation; we do it all the time mentally and with physical things like bits of food or drink or folding a piece of paper
Let me ask you something in return: do you think you can’t use fractions with metric? If you prefer fractions, that’s fine, but you haven’t justified why it’s better to use a system of measurement based on vibes.
1/4" = 0.25" 1/4mm = 0.25mm
Let me also ask, do you think the rest of the world moved away from it for no reason?
Are you telling us that you are actually making, say a box, by measuring it with your hands and feet? That’s barbaric! I’m guessing you actually use a tape measure like the rest of us.
You and @Zerush both resorted to this fake idea that [not using the metric convention] = [measuring things with your body-parts]
Very weird lie. I’ll take it as an admission you’re out of sensible points.
That is what you’re implying by saying that imperial is more intuitive. But if you’re measuring with normal measurement equipment that argument is moot. At that point using imperial is easier for you just because you’re used to it. When normal people have to use imperial for things, all intuition is out the door and it will be hell.
You’re failing to externalise your own experience from the situation. Maybe you should practice that a bit more.
Woodworking, sure. You have a piece of wood 2’ 5 5/8“ long that you need to cut into quarters. Can you calculate that in your head? Metric is SOOOO much easier.
here’s how i did: 2’/4=6", 5 5/8"/4=1 13/32, so it’s 7 13/32"
smart to pick a prime numerator!
Alternatively, the same measurement is 752.5mm / 4 = 188.1mm, to a practical number of significant figures. No convertions between feet and inches (or ridiculous fractions of inches), and only one calculation.
Yes but my measuring tape actually has 32nds on it. The meter side only has whole divisions, not tenth graduations.
So the sae “ridiculous fraction” is a measurement I can easily make with tools I have on hand to the tools own limit of precision and double check in my head with five seconds of fifth grade level mathematics while the metric one can’t be actually measured without a set of calipers and honestly would merit long division or a calculator to double check and still needs rounding off a vile eighth of millimeter to hit what is in your own words “a practical number of significant figures”.
Imma throw something out there and I hope the earnest admission that I can’t divide 752.5 by four in my head with the level of confidence required to cut materials by is enough to recognize it not as an attack but as a real grasp at understanding:
People who make posts like yours either don’t measure things in any meaningful way (cutting, dividing, scribing lines, etc) or don’t know how to work with fractions.
Like I said: it’s not an attack, I just can’t see how someone would suggest that the metric equivalent to 13/32 is easier to work with unless they didn’t intend to actually measure it or couldn’t do fractions.
