Metric is officially recognized across the US. European minds cannot comprehend this.
DAd Heard Karl Marx Gave The Proletariat Eleven Zeppelins Yo
No yotta-? How do you describe the number of joulles it takes to blow up a planet?
While we’re on the subject, can we please kill off “kilowatt hours”. Fuckers, those are Joules, 3.6 Megajoules specifically.
Nah it’s more relatable to humans regarding electricity consumption, the consumer would be confused and scared seeing 3.6 megajoules on a bill and not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units. That’s why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts and the bill shows a relatable term.
To add to that, that’s why so many metric countries (not USA) still use imperial units colloquially because they are more relatable in real life like lbs and inches and feet. But then would use Km and grams in other contexts quite normally. And knots still always make more sense to pilots and sailors.
Sorry you totally lost me on the second paragraph. What you describe there is basically a British thing. On the continent people use m, kg and such for daily life things.
Knots are used because of historic influences and inertia. Imperial units in some special cases are exclusively used because of the influence of the US and again inertia.
I want to upvote metric, but downvote “tiddies”. 😡
The hangup in the US for a lot of it is the people who would keep trying to convert back into English units instead of just riding with it. Especially silly when it doesn’t change anything.
Fun coincidence that I was working on making a graph (network) of the relationships between different units yesterday. Here is how it looks in a circle, yellow dots are lengths, mass red and time blue.
It’s not perfect on the phone, but here is the link, press the “Refresh All” button to load the network and run the code.
https://nadi-system.github.io/playground.html?example=units
Context: I’m writing a programming language to analyze graphs, so I thought “units are graph relationships, let me see what I can do”. It was fun, but also funny because so many relationships are not simple factor multiplications. The network was extracted from the data gnu units uses, but I did it halfhazardly, so it’s not perfect.
You can play around with the code if you wanna try your own things, there’s user documentation and more examples. The actual network can be viewed using the buttons on the left of the editor.
Wait, no, please convince my countryfolk to metricate. I’m an engineer and desperately want to be able to design things in metric. It’s so much better but the average American doesn’t know a meter from a hole in their ass
But they do know litres, because the big soft drink bottles are sold in litres. They know grams if they do drugs or bake. They know prefixes like Mega, Giga and Tera if they are into computers, and they know about “kilo” if they pay an electrical bill. If they’re into military stuff, they know about “clicks”, which are actually… kilometers.
I think it’s slowly creeping in.
So weird phenomenon actually, because our military is fully metricated, you wind up with some of the most die hard American exceptionalist/American nationalist types fully using metric and 24 hour time. A friend was raised in a household like that where they just didn’t use US customary at home because the military doesn’t.
We’re all taught a lot of the basics in school. And yeah we have an instinctive idea of what 2L looks like. Drug users know grams, as do some bakers (a lot of baking is still done by volume here). And other than that I’d say maybe a quarter of Americans know that a meter is kinda close to a yard. Maybe 5% (may be overestimating tbh) know that a liter of water is a kilogram.
Slowly but surely though more things are being roundish numbers in metric here (like 325 mL/12.9 fluid ounces) and I think that’s a vital component of the move to metric. We are actually headed there, we’re just slower than the UK and Canada.
Normalize it. Use meters and kilograms on your own even before legislation. Convince others to use it. Push back the storm. If a handful of people in your town use it then it goes from something that nobody uses to a thing that a few people (and the rest of the world) use. Be the change you want to see.
“The story of the metric system starts, somewhat unexpectedly, in 17th Century England, with the proposal by the natural philosopher John Wilkins for a consistently decimal system of units. The Europe of his time was divided by the use of innumerable different systems of measure, with each country using its own traditional units (and in many cases, a lack of even national standardisation meant that different regions within countries would use their own measures). To remedy this, Wilkins conceived of a single, rational standard, based on the best science of his time, which all nations could equally share. His idea for a “universal Measure” was not adopted in his era, although that very phrase would ultimately (via Greek translation) give us the name of the metre.”!
Dat hourglass figure
Did you know that Americans use Milli-inches?
how else are we gonna measure our dangles?
Thou.
usa kicked the Brits out of the usa back in the day but they stole and kept their system of measurements (and of course adapted them over time, like americans do). They avoid the metric system by a country kilometer.
I’ve only ever encountered decaliters in Dune, where there’s the awkward phrase “38 million decaliters” instead of “380 million liters”. It’s probably because Frank Herbert was initially thinking in gallons, and it got changed later.
Or just 380 ML (Megalitres).
Don’t make me start measuring things in decifeet just to be contrary. I have a measuring tape dividing the foot in tenths and I’m not afraid to use it.
Us surveyors use it every day!
Metric haters when they realize their electricity is measured in Volts (metric unit), not in “relatable” units like Sparks:
Last night was so hot, my ac took three sparks per witchburn!
I changed my car to metric.
When I returned to pick up my car after dropping it off for a smog check, the tech hadn’t done it. He noticed the odometer was in kilometers and putting that “mileage” in the system would have caused havoc on the car’s history (mileage seeming to go up and down is a red flag).
As annoying as that was, it would have been far worse if he’d just entered the kilometers as miles.
Which is to say that switching now is more than just putting up new speed limit signs.
I use metric daily as an engineer, but in my personal life I find some metric measurements pretty silly. Celsius and L/100km are not useful or show it’s not a great system for everyday use.
Celsius and L/100km are not useful or show it’s not a great system for everyday use.
This is probably just a matter of taste and convention. If everyone knew what 12°C was, then it would be perfectly fine for everyday use. Everywhere else in the world, people are using it for everyday use, and they’re doing just fine.
Same for L/100km. Oops, you specifically wanted to know how far you were going to go with 1 Liter? You can convert that just fine. But it’s just as likely that you’re looking at mpg, and you actually wanted to know how many gallons it would take for you to go from A to B, in which case you also need to do a conversion.
How cool is it outside? I dunno, around 10 to 12.778 C I think.
Much better than 50-55 F.
I know I’m being silly, but my brain likes numbers like 5 and 10. I can’t imagine saying 10 to 13. And a 5 degree swing in C feels too big.
A good measurement system for humans needs to have roughly fudgeable numbers within the ranges that we regularly experience. Which is to say, whatever temperature system we use to describe outside temperature should go from 0 to 100 in the range of temperatures we experience outside. It’s like metric, but for people instead of water. Fahrenheit isn’t perfect. The 0 should be colder. The 100 should be hotter. But not by much.
You are fooled by your own habits. Most of the world uses C just fine and why wouldn’ they? The steps of one °C are just what starts to be relevant in daily life. Yes you would totally say it has 13°C and not round up to 5 or 10s. The latter you would only do if your unit system has more precision than is needed.
That said, if you want more precision just say 13.4°C. Some wearher forecasts do that but it is really not very releant what comes after the comma for daily weather forecast needs.
I know I’m being silly, but my brain likes numbers like 5 and 10. I can’t imagine saying 10 to 13. And a 5 degree swing in C feels too big.
Yeah, but that’s because that’s what you’re used to with the F scale.
If you were estimating a number of tablespoons of sugar, you wouldn’t be estimating in groups of 5, because that’s crazy. You’re probably more accustomed to estimating one tablespoon at a time. The same with estimating measuring cups of milk.
Or, if you don’t cook very much, for estimating walking distances, you’re not estimating in groups of 5 miles. You might group by quarter miles and say, “It’s a quarter mile away,” or a half or something.
There’s nothing special about this scale. All of the supposed benefits are the result of your familiarity with it. Had we been using °C the whole time instead, you would be estimating degrees two at a time instead of 5, and everything would be completely normal.
nah, tablespoons you estimate in groups of four. teaspoons in groups of three.
