What has he done to deserve this?
What has he done to deserve this?
Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren't they?
301 comments
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From John Bazell “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.”
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I mean, 1btu is required per pound of water per degree Farenheit. About 8lbs/gal and raising it 142°f would mean 1136btus
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So intuitive!
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Just remember to keep track of which BTU you're using
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There's a popular argument against religion that essentially says that if any trace of a specific religion were wiped off the face of the Earth, it would never come back. As in there'd probably be something in its place, but there'd be no way that the specific beliefs practiced by that religion would ever return. Whereas if a piece of scientific knowledge were similarly wiped from human knowledge, it would eventually be rediscovered.
A similar argument can be made with the metric system: I think that if standardized measurement systems disappeared from the face of the Earth today, something extremely similar would eventually be invented and adopted. It's just too internally consistent and human mental math too grounded in decimal for it not to be. You'd probably even end up with a prefix-based (probably even Greek) naming scheme.
Now consider USC: the units fail to fit together in basically any meaningful way. They try but fail to be base-2, so you can't even come at it from the already-tenuous angle of base-2 being better than base-10 (e.g. volume skips what two quarts would be, weight is more like base-16 (???), and distance just does something so insane that probably 95% of American adults couldn't tell you how many feet there are in a mile). There are dozens of completely arbitrary, unintuitive, antiquated-sounding names (e.g. "horsepower"). Although the bases for metric measurements are rather arbitrary, they are extraordinarily precise, so much so that USC bases its own measurements off of insane but precise multiples of metric units. That's not to say that humans would jump straight to metric or anything, but moreso that whatever would fill USC's role as an intermediary between nothing and the metric-like system would likey be unrecognizable from current USC.
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The "intuitiveness" of imperial measurements is that they're sorta human-scaled, at least for human-sized measurements. An inch is about the same length as the tip of my thumb, a foot is about as big as my foot, a yard is a single pace if I stretch a bit, etc. which makes it easier for a person to picture it.
Once you get out of that scale it really starts to break down though.
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I would agree with you that something similar to metric would eventually arise, but I would consider duodecimal to make more sense than decimal, as 12 is a superior highly composite number and the terminating representation is much shorter for more commonly used fractions (e.g. 1⁄4 would be represented as 0.3, 1⁄3 as 0.4, 1⁄2 as 0.6, etc). I would also argue that groupings in powers of 12² make more sense than 10³.
I would also argue that it would make more sense for measurements to be based on natural units (such as Planck length) for all the basic measurements (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela), such that the anthropic unit (the one you'd most commonly refer to without prefixes) would be some multiple of 12 away from the natural unit.
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Or they answer in BTUs. But ask them which BTU they're using, and they won't know.
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Calorie? Are they part of metric system? Everyone uses Joule.
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Calories are metric but not SI.
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centigrade
and he was doing so well until this abomination 😡
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Applied to a real situation I've been through :
- my pool 4.5m wide, 9m long and 1.5m deep, the current level of salt is 2.5g/l and a bag of salt weight 20kg. How many bags of salt do I need to bring the level to 3g/l ?
- OR: my pool 14'9" wide, 29'6" long and 5' deep, the current level of salt is 2500ppm and a bag of salt weights 40lbs. How many bags of salt do I need to bring the level to 3000ppm ?
The answer to one is 1.5 bag, the answer to the other one is "fuck that, I'm getting 8 bags at the store and it should be good enough"
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... weighs one gram ... An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say "An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it" (far less elegant) -- but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.
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1917 shitpost with obstinate opinions held to this day. Brilliant!
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I don't think anyone believes the current system to be better, rather too much of a pain to replace. Americans really dislike learning and being inconvenienced.
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Americans really dislike learning and being inconvenienced.
it's worse than that-- we have gallons of milk, but liters of soda. we drive in mph, but run in 5K. science and medicine weights are grams, but recipes call for ounces. want to fix an american car--hope you have both metric and "standard" wrenches
more like we'd rather stay with the stupidness and inconvenience we know rather than change anything, no matter how much better it would be
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It has nothing to do with disliking learning. Trying to learn and use a system of measurement without being immersed in it is really hard. For years, I've set all my temperature measurements on my phone and thermometers to Celsius, but because I'm surrounded by people and systems that don't use metric, I have to convert back and forth between the two. It's a lot of mental effort for basically no gain.
Every day, customary speed and distance units and my intuitive understanding of them are reinforced when driving and seeing street signs. I know how long a kilometer is, but if you say "My brother lives 45 kilometers away", I'd have a difficult time truly understanding that. I wouldn't be able to estimate how long it would take to drive there, for example.
Another issue is cost. In my job, it would take weeks or months to update all of the documentation and code to metric. Then customers would have to approve of all those changes. A whole bunch of machinery still uses customary units too, so they would have to be replaced or updated.
I say all of this as a metric lover and evangelist. It's not trivial to convert an entire massive country to metric. Countries that have converted already should be hugely proud of themselves for accomplishing a difficult task.
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All I can say is that the metric system was predominantly taught in my American school experience, with US units mainly limited to math class. The only thing that sucked about using metric in science class is the short unit we had where we needed to convert measurements between metric and US, which I think was arguably the point.
It's corporations, really, that seem to insist on having their products and tools still defaulting to US customary units, and I can't fathom why. Even when you go abroad and try to buy a TV, they're all still labeled in inches, which boggles my mind.
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Hundreds of millions of people learned the new units when their countries switched.
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Inconvenienced might be right. The tagline from the poster treats metric implementation as a punishment. "What has he done to deserve this?" Has the same victimized tone like, "Look what they done to my boy" which completely disregards the merits of either system in favor of nationalism. It almost seems like a cold-war era ideal.
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Except that it has been replaced, or is not the preferred unit for trade and commerce. The SI has been the “preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” since 1975 according to United States law. Too bad most other Americans are too scared of change to use it everywhere else.
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The idea that a simpler system of weights and measures that operate in base-10 will somehow cripple America is somehow fucking hilarious.
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What was the point of this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?
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Try farming in Canada. I will actually use liters per acre as a unit to measure in liquid fertilizer into a sprayer, spray it at gallons per acre and drive the sprayer at kph with a pump pressure in PSI on a field that was surveyed in rods.
It'll get harvested by a machine that has all metric bolts and uses a 30' cutting platform, the grain will be measured in bushels on the yield monitor and sold in $/bushel with the selling agent but the contract will be in tonnes and delivered that way.
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And you have to do it in two languages too.
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Well, chances are the Quebecers will have to learn English because I think ag equipment is exempt from dual language laws. At least I've never seen a part number for French manuals.
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How awful. Making someone divide things by 10 instead of 12, 16, or fucking 64.
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10 can only be divided evenly by 2 and 5. 12 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, or 6. The Babylonians were right, base12 is superior to base10.
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In retrospect I definitely would have liked a duodecimal metric system, but we have what we have at this point. It's good enough and a DAMN sight better than imperial.
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That would be an argument....IF it would be consistently 16 between each unit
Il leave this one here to see if it's 16 every time: https://youtu.be/r7x-RGfd0Yk
Spoiler: it's not!
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I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅
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Lab rat here. I got you fam! Let's collectively believe that BTU's are real!
Wait...
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Uuummm... Ackshually Americans don't use imperial units, they use united States customary units. Which are similar, but just a smidge different.
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Poster shows the metric system giving Uncle Sam giant balls of steel?
Imperial emasculates.
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Actually, I suspect those are balls of iron.
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It's possible! We can switch! I'm US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.
Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I've been shocked at how many people don't realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using "Mexico units" once... Also, I've met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is... uh... interesting. The arguments y'all are having here are way more advanced than what I've run into.
For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that's it. The weather says it's 25c outside? Don't convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Over time you'll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.
Of course, until we all switch you'll really end up being bilingual...
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We actually were transitioning to metric when Carter was president and making progress. We did a lot of dual markings like highway signs, weather reports, etc.
The we ejected Reagan. And metric is used for pop and drugs.
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Drug dealers just know what units system is superior
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Oh is THAT why every American knows how big 9mm is
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Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…
Biunitated?
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For me it was particularly easy as it's only Chevy and Ford cars that still use the imperial system for nuts and bolts so I've been making use of the metric system for pretty much every car I've worked on and I never really understood ferinhight to start off with as I only really cared about is it going to snow temperature wise so why memorize a number for something your only going to check one time in the year now that I've gotten accustomed to Celsius I'm now paying attention to if it's going to rain or not
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Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn't the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).
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One kilometer is 1000 meters, one meter is 1000 millimeters. One square meter is 1,000,000 millimeters, one cubic meter is 1000 liters.
1 liter of water is 1 kilograms, so 1 cubic meter is 1000 kilograms. Sand is about 2.3 times heavier than water, so 1 cubic meter of sand is 2300 kilograms, or 2.3 metric tonnes.
I'm 1.96 meters tall, or 1 meter and 960 millimeters, or 1 meter and 96 centimeters. I weigh about 85 kilos, or 85.000 grams. Being 65% water, I carry about 55.25 kilograms of water, which will fill a little over 55 one liter water bottles
I can do this all day
Now let's do the same with imperial units! You first, cuz I'm not going to touch that shit with a 10 foot pole...
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One mile is 5280 feet, one foot is 12 inches. One square foot is 144 square inches, one cubic foot is 1728 cubic inches.
1 gallon of water is 8.34 pounds, and 1 cubic foot is 7.48 gallons, so a cubic foot of water weighs 62.38 pounds. If sand is 2.3 times heavier than water, a cubic foot of sand weighs 143.5 pounds.
I am 5 feet 10 inches tall, or 5.83 feet, or 70 inches. I weigh about 220 pounds, or 3520 ounces. If I’m 65% water, I carry about 143 pounds of water, or a little over 16 gallons.
Guh
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That was totally logical to me
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Cool.
Also great way to miss the point. And great use of your calculator. The entire thing is that the metric system is not just "arbitrary amounts", it's all designed to fit together easily.
Now, no calculator. How many feet is 0.683 miles?
I know that 0.683 kilometers is 683 meters.
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This guy/gal specific gravities.
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Height in imperial is kinda useful. If you say a person is 4 foot tall vs 6 foot tall it immediately paints a vivid picture
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This isn't some intrinsic value. What you're used to makes the most sense. If you were used to measuring people's height in meters, 1.3 meters vs 2 meters would paint just as vivid a picture.
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That paints nothing to me, nor anyone in the rest.od the world. That literally only works in the US and a few other thirds world countries...
1-80 versus 2 meter does the same and makes sense
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The more I read about America, the more I realise what a fucking stupid country it was, is, and will probably keep on being.
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If I could read, I'd probably be insulted by this comment.
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Hence the effort to defund education.
As if people weren't so fuckin dumb already.
Christ WTF year are we fucking in you guys?
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There are some pretty smart people in America tho
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Indeed, too bad nobody wants to listen to them
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uncle sam you dense motherfucker go to SCHOOL
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1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg. 1kg (of anything) is 1000g. 1g of water is 1cm³. Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column. This column exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base. To heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal. And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.
I've posted this before on my mastodon, and on feddit.de, before the instance was shut down, but I think it's still a nice showcase how SI units interact with one another.
The worst thing we have in the metric system is kWh/1000h. It's just watts, but whoever designed the energy labels thought a bunch of zeros would be funny or something.
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The kWh/1000h does convey more information than just W though. If I buy a fridge and it says 100W I wouldn't know if that's its max power draw or average over time. With the 1000h in there it's pretty clear we are talking about the average.
Also people who aren't technically minded might only know "kWh" as that's what it states on your power bill and they can directly guess what kind of energy bill this fridge might cause.
So you are technically correct I guess and we all know that's the best kind of correct.
We do have worse stuff in the metric system though, kcal is not the same as the SI for energy (J) for example. Also everything involving time gets messy quickly. Nothing compared to the imperial measurements obviously -
I've heard that kWh/1000h is used as a power rating for light bulbs, because if they just wrote it as watts, people might confuse it with a brightness rating (e.g. "this LED bulb produces as much light as a 100W incandescent bulb")
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There are multiple copies of this posted in the cabinet shop where I work. In Canada.
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Ugh, who wants to change to a base-10 system when we keep what ever we have now?
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I mean there's really only four ways people use imperial over metric
For cooking, For weighing themselves, For measuring distances, For measuring temperature.
For most other purposes, especially where scientific accuracy is called for, Americans are perfectly aware of and capable of using metric, and mostly do so.
Metric pushing at this point is basically bashing non academics for continuing to use a colloquial measurement that serves them just fine for what they actually need to measure and visualize on a daily basis.
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You forgot one: Fasteners, i.e. nuts and bolts, when all the rest of the world has been metric for decades and whatever it is you're taking apart almost certainly uses metric bolts (car, appliance, electronic device, whatever). But your local hardware store still gives you attitude over metric being ''''''''specialty'''''''' and the majority of their selection of bolts and machine screws are fractional inch which will not fit approximately 99.8% of all manufactured goods from the last century, let alone this one.
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Imperial is intermixed woth metric in constructionnand a ton of engineering projects as materials are still manufactured in imperial measurements. Farming is still stuck in imperial too.
Both are still around because an entire industry changing fundamental measurements is a lot of effort.
My second favorite example of the two living in harmony for the average US citizen is the liquir store. Beer comes in ounces but hard liquir and wine comes in metric.
My favorite is soda, which comes in 20 oz and 2 liter bottles on the same shelf. People opposed to the metric system tend to ignore the fact that they are already using it somewhere in their lives and just don't notice.
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How many centimeters in a kilometer?
How many inches in a mile?
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American answer: "Shut up, Euro-freak. I'm trying to watch Big Bang Theory reruns."
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Strange how you can easily work out the former, but the latter could be anything from 28 to 56285794
🤔
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Km is 103m cm is 10-2m so the difference is 105 i.e. 100000 (one with 5 zeroes)
Or more intuitively one centi-meter is a 1/100 of a meter and Kilo-Meter is 1000 meter therefore 100*1000 100000
It is quite intuitive, once you start using it
What's weird is why we don't use Megameters and megagrams (i.e. one metric ton)
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Nobody knows
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The US Government is entirely metric. It’s just the US Citizens that aren’t. So there’s this entire separation where no one uses metric, so nothing is made for metric, since nothing is made for metric, no one uses metric.
Obviously that’s changing over time plenty of people use a mixture of both systems all the time. The machines are mostly driving adoption at this point. 3D printers, cars, etc.
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Metric is just easier and the founders of the US actually considered it but wars -obviously- distracted them from switching to it.
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I believe in some countries in the world, the year goes first, then the month, then the day (2024/08/08 or 2024, August 8). Seems more logical to me than the literal inverse (08/08/2024 or 8 August 2024).
But yeah, the metric system reigns supreme.
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Fuck that, we should be measuring everything in Stone.
I'll take a seventh stone of chicken please.
And lengths in Royal cubits.
If we're gonna go weird we need to go all the way.
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Uncle Sam couldn't handle the success the metric system would bring. /s
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Jesus this is dumb. And it worked?
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Doesn't the reason why the avg US citizen wants imperial units boil down to "sounds cooler"?
Kilometer vs Miles, the
formerlatter sounds easier and cooler to work withCentimeter vs inch, same.
How will they now call a two by four?
It's kind of the same for the pro gun arguments, it all boils down to "but guns are cool toys!"
Edit: fixed a duuuhhh
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A 2x4 is actually 1.5" x 3.5" so you are not standing on solid ground with that one.
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Americans choosing the system with tougher math requirements is suprising.
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We see it as sticking to what we're used to... As conservative as we are overall, is it really that surprising?
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It's all conservatives clinging to really outdated and stupid shit
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Between the kilometer vs miles, isn't the "former" here the kilometer? So you're saying the metric system sounds cooler? But then you went on to say two by four which is an imperial thing... am I confused?
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Yeap, they got former and latter crossed
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Yeah my bad. I meant latter there, and fixed it.. Thanks!
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A "five by ten" I would say, doesnt sound to bad.
I think its mostly ingrained into the population at this point.
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My comparison is that the metric system is like color vision. It's like colors for traffic lights, but USC people insist it's fine memorizing which light is which location. In metric you just see the world in a way USC can't, but USC people insist they're just fine.
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Imperial US system is defined using the metric system...
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This is his punishment for war crimes.
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And the most ridiculous (or inclusive) thing are tiresizes in Europe (perhaps somewhere else, too?). 195/55r16 195 is the width in millimeters 55 is the height in percentage of the width R16 is the radius of the wheel in inches
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Same in US...
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Yes! 🤩😍😍😍😭😭😭
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The metric system is a threat to our way of life - Kyle
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Can't wait for the day when Uncle Sam to turns brown.
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Lol this thread got spicy. Today I learned base 12 is actually superior to base 10 in a myriad of ways.
It seems the most reasonable people in this thread are arguing for a new system, not one or the other. I concur with this thought.
So... Fuck the imperial AND metric system. I'm team new system.
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The base 12 system was real popular in Sumeria.
So your new system is akshualy the oldest.
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Base twelve would be great if we went all-in, as in new symbols for single digit representation of ten and eleven, then 10 would mean twelve. Having a base that's divisible by several primes is handy.
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Same. Until then, I use both.
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What 'has' we done. Well, they didn't go to school, that's for sure. And clearly they didn't send their kids to school either, as it's a damn old poster and it's been more then a hundred years while the US still uses imperial.
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Y'all preach about how much better the metric system is because it's base ten and super intuitive, then measure weather temperature on a scale from -20C to 40C 🥴
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Well, yeah. Anything less than 0 is freezing and anything greater than 0 isn't.
Ezpz
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Fahrenheit makes more sense for human experience... 0 to 100 roughly corresponds to what can be survived for a significant amount of time. Below freezing you can survive without shelter as long as you're dressed for it, but as you approach zero it gets a lot harder, you really need shelter and heat at that point. Same with above 100... 117 won't kill you right away, but without some sort of man-made cooling device, you'll be wishing it would. I say this having lived both extremes, mountains of Colorado in winter, and Phoenix in summer... Honestly, given the choice between 115 and -15, I'd rather have the cold.
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Yeah... We do.. everyday. Its not hard
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Fair, but that's pretty much how a lot of people feel about imperial units, too.
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What.
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This is among the dumbest internet arguments ever.
G20/G21. The machines don't care, my digital calipers, micrometers, rulers, and 3D CAD software don't care which system is being used. So why should I have my undies in a bunch about which is better? I use the measurement system best suited for the task at hand - whether that's metric, US customary, or light years.
As for not knowing how many inches are in a mile, that's about the stupidest internet point ever. No one cares about that, well maybe some civil engineer might need to very rarely care in some unusual situation. The scale of measurement is wrong for inches. In fact, most people don't care much about the actual distance away something is, they mostly care about how long does it take to get there. The odds are pretty good you have no idea how far it is from your front door to the grocery store in miles or kilometers. But you DO know how long it takes to get there. Whether by foot, bike, bus, or car.
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The machines don't care.
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That rocket that crashed because of usage of different units seems to differ.
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Oh yeah? I bet you also use mebibyte instead of megabytes!
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Weird how you think inches are only used for long distances and not, for example, making sure a beam is the right length while you're building a house, or making sure a screw is the right size.
But I do agree that inches are not practical for long distances. That's probably why people in the U.S. use miles.
301 comments