Burgerperson here, metric should be standard
There was something I read once upon a time that was like:
F is how hot/cold people are C is how hot/cold water is K is how hot/cold matter is
I feel like that’s pretty accurate.
I got used to Celsius while living abroad in Europe and Japan and prefer it to Fahrenheit. The extra granularity of the latter scale doesn’t really add much more utility.
However, while 32 F and 212 F are pretty arbitrary, so is calibrating to the freezing and boiling temperatures of water. I’d rather have a scale that’s calibrated to humans rather than H2O.
Fun fact Americans do both
212 warm / 100 warm
warmMeme was made by a space shuttle tile.
0 is absolute cold, any other system is wrong.
0 C being the temperature water freezes is useful for knowing if there is ice outside, which has practical use. If we keep going the way we are, soon 100 will be an indicator that there is no water outside. Practical if you’re a hydrophobe or hydrophile.
Soon it won’t matter anyways. Isn’t AmericaUS like…done now? We can move on with our normal shit and chuckle at it like a museum piece.
Come up with a metric time system then. Also, fix the damn calendar.
Calling the boiling point of water simply “warm” is a bit sus.
It’s a warm sauna.
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The one thing that bothers me about the metric system is how much of it is never actually used. No one says “1 megameter”, for example. They say “1,000 kilometers”. When you think about it, most metric prefixes are never used with most metric units.
Similarly, how the kilogram is the SI unit for weight, not the gram.
I think I never saw using Deca- and deci- in real life
We use decimetres in chemistry a fair bit. 1 mole of any gas will occupy 24 dm³ at rtp
thats just liters
Lo be unto the metric users, that the units of length and volume conveniently sync up!
How many cubic inches is a gallon btw?
Deciliters are used in cooking
decigrams are quite common in cooking/trading food
“deci” is very popular. Just not in the “correct” form “decimeter”.
In Spanish it’s normal to say “8 décimas”, which means 8 tenths. It is context dependent though. For example if speaking in a context where millimeters are used, it will be 8 tenths of a milimiter. That is, 0,8mm.
But yeah, it is very uncommon to use deci and deca. Because they’re just not very useful. We are used to 2 digit numbers, or numbers with 2 decimal places. So 87m is not harder to use than 8,7dam.
It’s probably also the reason there is no prefix between kilo and mega, or milli and micro. (They are x1000 increments instead of x10).
For the same reason, when in a context of millimeters, it’s preferred to say “87mm” instead of “8,7cm”.
I’ve thought that was weird too. Decimeter’s seems like a good unit for measuring a person’s height, for instance.
It’s because metric sucks at anything on a human scale and most people deal with things on a human scale. Imperial was developed over hundreds of years to be extremely narrow and scope in a specific two things at a human scale.
It’s a big reason why imperial makes far more sense. If you actually need to talk about anything on a human scale, everything no matter how nonsensical makes sense the moment, it’s explained because it’s all extremely intuitive.
While metric is basically a tiny fraction of a technically Superior system that basically makes no f****** sense in 99% of cases for a day-to-day life.
Try metric is the measurement of science, engineering and other fields of study because they actually do with things outside of day-to-day human scope
As the saying goes, use the right tool for the right job and only a dumb f*** uses the wrong tool for the wrong job
I have no idea what you’re talking about… humans are around 1-2m tall, weigh about 40-80kg, have a body temperature of about 37 C, and need to drink a couple litres of water per day. How are these units not the proper order of magnitude for measuring things “on a human scale”?
Hell naw…what do you mean human scale, my foot is probably smaller than yours
Don’t get me started with thumbs…
Could you give an example of a situation where metric makes less sense than imperial? I will then explain to you that it only appears to you like that, because those are the units you’ve lived your whole life using. Without that baggage, the adaptability and easy conversions make SI-units objectively superior in every situation.
Found the US-American. Go vote Trump or whatever it is y’all do over there lol.
I’m accustomed to the imperial system. But agree that metric is better.
Some metric stuff I have no trouble with. I have a good spatial sense of the distance of a mm, m, and km. And can do a rough miles to km (and vice versa) conversion in my head. I have a good sense of how much a kg is and similarly can do a rough conversion to and from lbs in my head. But while I understand that a gram is 1/1000 of a kg, if handed a small object and asked to guess how many grams it is, I’d fail miserably.
Celsius I can’t ever remember the conversion, but I’ve had enough exposure to it that I understand if it means cold/cool/warm/hot weather.
Everyone in metric zone fails as well to guess weights of a few grams :) best I can do is estimate 1/4 kilos
A sugar cube is a gram. That’ll get you close enough.
Tbf as someone who grew up with the imperial system due to being raised by a British boomer its fairly easy if you’re familiar with it, I still often cook in imperial due to a load of old cook books I have.
Having said that anyone who wants the imperial system in the modern day is a absolute idiot, metric is objectively superior.
A brit once told me that the imperial system makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of a peasant at the market - units of 12 was a lot easier to work with in the olden days because it’s easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6.
I guess it makes sense from a historical viewpoint.
Its basically entirely this, its not for no reason much of the world wound up using something akin to it. Honestly for small scale stuff such as cooking I do genuinely quite like using it but especially in the digital age its simply become obsolete I can’t imagine having to code something which requires employing imperial measurements.
I just wish it was always 12 instead of 3, 12, 1760 and whatever the eff they come up with.
Farenheit on the other hand does not make sense at all
Fahrenheit makes more sense as a unit in use. 100 equals hot, but doesn’t equal death, 0 equals cold. In a lot of the world freezing is only kind of cold, not actually cold. Metric makes sense for science while imperial is more of a common persons unit; that’s also why Americans in science use metric.
Best way to use Fahrenheit is to consider it as a percentage of how hot it is. 0 degrees is zero percent hot, and 100 is fully hot. Beyond that you’re in super cold/hot territory.
But yeah, Celsius is still better.
Fahrenheit is better at describing weather in reference to human interaction with temperature Celsius is better for everything else.
But that’s the same for everything imperial. It’s always better when it comes to actual human elements. How big is that stick? How many things in that piece of bread? How much weight is that rock? I need to move.
While metric is basically better anytime you have tooling you need to be extremely exact. You need to know something that is less human and more mathematical or abstract.
Well each system can do the thing. They’re not great at it quickly falls apart. That’s a big reason why people tend to say imperial sucks. Most people no longer actually interact with the natural world anymore. Everything is computers, exact measurements, quantifiable numbers from shops. The only thing left that most people deal with on a day-to-day basis is the weather and why Fahrenheit may be better than Celsius. It’s only vaguely better since weather is already such an imprecise thing that really doesn’t matter.
Well yes the granularity of Fahrenheit is far more useful. If you actually want to be like specific about things Celsius when it comes to weather it’s close enough f****** does the job
That “better reference to human interaction” argument just doesn’t hold any water though. The claim that using imperial means you are closer to nature is ludicrous and also horrendously US defaultist. Much of continental Europe was fully metric when people were still so much “closer to nature” and barely anything “was computer” yet, except for some room filling mainframes. Yet people here had no issue with all those metric units.
While imperial is absolutely atrocious at engineering and at scientific applications, SI units work perfectly fine for human reference interactions. Are there tiny differences, that give maybe imperial an edge in some circumstances? Possibly? In a way that it actually matters? Hardly.
This is certainly the case for °C vs °F. Anything finer than °C is below the precision of everyday thermometers and also hard to percept. While increments larger than that can be easily measured and are also perceptible. All relevant environmental temperatures are merely 2 digits, with boiling water at 100. That’s perfectly adjusted to human interaction and reference. Most people don’t need finer “granularity” in everyday life but if they do, they simply include the first position after the comma. This is optional and completely frictionless “ganularity”, when you need it.
I am not saying that Fahrenheit is necessarily worse. It is one of the few imperial units that don’t suck. But it is also not meaningfully better either, just different.
I mean, you can always use different units in different contexts. We use F for the weather but C for the kettle, personally! (C for the oven would probably also be better, but all the recipes are in F.)
– Frost
It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)
So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile
… And of course there’s the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.
Imperial is FAR more human and “natural” then metric. Metric fails frequently at being quantifiable with natural experiences and objects.
But imperial falls apart the second your trying to do something at a large scale, super small scales or literally anything that isn’t “human scale”
And basically every test I’ve ever seen. If you don’t have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.
Metric relies far too much on reference in tooling, but that’s also its greatest strength. It’s absurdly, exact and reliable while imperial is loosey-goosey
And basically every test I’ve ever seen. If you don’t have tools or some reference point, people will nine times out of 10 be able to more accurately gauge something using imperial measurements then using metric measurements.
That’s clearly utter bollocks
The biggest issue with imperial recipes is the constant use of measures by volume. If everything was in weight ounces it would be alright, but a lot of recipes insist on measuring solids by volume, like a cup of flour, a teaspoon of sugar etc, making them a lot harder to replicate consistently. My flour could be denser, my sugar could be finer, if things were measure by the actual mass such things would not matter but instead I have to fill a cup and pray to the gods that my cup of Ecuadorian flour has the same density as the one on the recipe (it almost never is)
Surely using oz & lbs on a scale solves this?
That’s the whole point, the recipes aren’t in oz and pounds, they’re in cups and table/teaspoons
Sounds like a issue with American cook books then ngl, you can also get defined standardised cul &tbsp scoops.
How do you define inch without metric units? How much is that?
Traditionally? An inch is three barley corns long.
Every country has a different definition of inch.
It was a beautiful chaos before metric!
