I do wish we metric places (or at least Canada) were more flexible and familiar with the whole system. Sure we have milliliters and centimeters and kilograms, but people say things all the time like 2000km or 2 million kgs, or even things like 25000mAh. And I get it, people get into a frame of reference and want to stay there, but I wish people had the agility and practice to say 2 megameters, 2 gigagrams, and, well 25 amp hours, and still be understood. That last one’s not hard, but packaging still seems to be stupid about it.
Big number good, ooga ooga.
It’s the only system, the imperial “system” is just some shenanigans on top of metric
Put this on the Ronald Reagan did it pile. Jimmy Carter started us on the path to metric and then Reagan halted it.
Trans girl I use to know called herself femto. I assumed it was because of her foot fetish but maybe it was related to the metric system.
Metric is officially recognized across the US. European minds cannot comprehend this.
To be fair, neither can American minds.
As a member of c/sciencememes, you have my sword! (Or, at least my upvote!)
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.
People are just used to kWh. There’s nothing about it that’s more intuitive, it’s just more familiar. But measuring things in hogsheads and barleycorns used to be familiar too. Sometimes being familiar isn’t as important as following standards. Eventually the standard units will become familiar, and since they’re standard units, they’re much easier to work with.
not actually understand how power usage of watts of appliances would convert into Joule energy units
1 joule per watt each second. It’s dead easy. That’s why Joules should be used.
That’s why electric cars motor powers are still rated in Watts
Yes, power should be measured in Watts, that’s the standard unit for power, just like Joules are the standard unit for energy.
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
No they’re not, it’s just that people are used to them. The people whose minds are the hardest to change are the old people who have used some random unit for all their lives and don’t want to have to get used to some newfangled standard (a standard that’s actually hundreds of years old at this point). Because the old people refuse to change, the country gets stuck using that old unit, even if it’s informally, and so that’s what the kids learn, then they become old people and are also inflexible.
There’s nothing about an inch or a pound that’s naturally more intuitive than a centimetre or a kilogram. It’s just what you’re used to. Go somewhere where people grew up with metric and for them using anything other than metric feels strange and awkward. Pilots and sailors are used to knots, they never had to switch, but when they do complex calculations they mostly avoid using knots because doing conversions with non-SI units is such a massive pain in the ass.
What makes lbs, inch and feet more relatable?
How is half a kg more relatable than one kg? Or how are 2½ cm more relatable than 1 cm? Or how are 30 cm more relatable than 10 cm or 100 cm?
I keep seeing your argument here and there, but I just cannot fathom what is meant by it. For me there’s nothing relatable at all in “foot”. It falls awkwardly between 10 cm and 100 cm and I cannot really make heads or tails about it. Except if I divide it by three, which gives me an approximate number in metres. But then the number could have been in metres in the first place.
Relatable I don’t think is the right word. Intuitive in its use and measurement, in specific scenarios.
Measurements always have a scaling and a precision problem. Humans are bad at math and scale, and really struggle mentally with numbers more than a few digits. If the number is too big, someone will either just accept it or ignore it. We like our nice round numbers, and funnily enough like our small prime numbers (1, 2, 3, and 5) and first few multiples of primes (4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20) and numbers that just shift the decimal point around (10, 100, 1000)
Reference frames are also incredibly useful to us, especially when communicating.
The metric system jumps straight to moving the decimal place around, where imperial let’s you play around with other divisors. Let’s say I have a single digit of some unit and I want to half it. Generally in metric this is fine, doesn’t really add to the mental cognitive load. Half it again, or divide by one of the other primes, and the number of digits starts to explode (or is infinitely repeating). For the scalers within the imperial system, they naturally let you divide down and even re-express the same measurement in a different unit with fewer integer numbers and no precision loss
Edit: Another example. Computer scientist don’t use metric, we bastardized parts of it and then invented extra units that fit the need and intuitiveness of working with them. We don’t use deci/deca or centi/centa, we bastardized kilo into 2^10 since 1024 is close to a thousand keeping it a nice power of two, a byte is 8 bits for the same reason and a nibble is 4 bits because halving bytes occasionally is useful. A word typically is 16 except when it is 32 bits, in which case 16 is a half word. Then we have dwords and qwords being twice and four times the size of a words, and then a page historically has been 4096 bytes since 1024 is kinda small, but newer systems sometime say a page is 64KB since 2^16 = 65536
While I think the metric system should be used more, I’ll also defend frantional measurements when precision matters. Decimal measurements only increase by a factor of 10. So if your precision is 1/8 of a meter, you have to either round to the nearest meter, overstate your precision (0.125 implies precision to 1mm), or essentially write a sentence (“125mm plus or minus 62.5mm”).
With fractional, the precision is built into the denominator. If your measurement of half a meter is precise to half a meter, you record it as “1/2”. If it’s precise to an pitch of a meter, you record it as “4/8”.
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.
Oh ok just a British thing so the ENTIRE BRITISH EMPIRE. Cool. Oh knots are used for historic influences like… Places that use imperial units colloquially but are official metric? Ohhh cool as well. Thanks for repeating just what I said and agreeing.
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?
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.
Yeah, that’s funny because the hoo-rah American Exceptionalist types are otherwise very conservative and dislike anything foreign, but they also adore the military, and the military has to be practical, and traditional units are so not practical.
I would guess that in time the US will adopt metric – it will happen much faster if the American Century ends and other countries become more powerful. Since almost everywhere else is mostly metric, the US won’t be able to go it alone anymore.
the average American doesn’t know a meter from a hole in their ass
Do they actually know yards? A metre is pretty close to one yard. If you know yard, you know the metre.
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.”!
Look at that hourglass figure
Now do the same with US customary units. Let’s see what their hourglass looks like 🫠
It’s the negative space between two soapy titties.
O O
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!
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.
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.
She’ll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kersone!
