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Just came here to nit-pick that the metric prefix for 103 is k and not K.
Case in point: Platinum melts around 2kK.
I’m an American and every last bit of my shop is metric. It is the superior unit of measurement in every aspect. I don’t bother with imperial at all. If I have to list dimensions online in imperial, just multiply mm x 25.4 which gives me inches. That’s as far as Ill go into inches and feet.
I’ve said this before and Ill say it again, the US was robbed of the superior unit of measurement.
What temperature is the shop kept at?
Fahrenheit. Switching to Kelvin soon, tho. For shop temp accuracy!
Thank you for your efforts!
Uh, I’m pretty sure you divide mm/25.4 to get inches.
Yes. I misspoke. Millimeters ÷ 25.4= inches. Inches x 25.4 = mm.
Sorry. I just thought it was funny in the context of a post about how it’s hard to remember all the conversions for imperial.
So, from my perspective, your experience gives me the exact opposite view. The fact is: no one is stopping us. Anyone in American can use metric any time they want. We use Imperial a significant amount of time because it’s useful. Feet and inches are related to body parts. Kilometers are too small for our giant country. I design surgical tools, and I use metric. I design buildings, and I use feet and inches.
I don’t really think it’s slowing us down to have more than one system.
Kilometers are too small for our giant country.
Fortunately for NASA, space is actually smaller than the USA. Otherwise km would be totally unworkable.
I’m guessing that you have to use meters instead of yards when designing tall buildings? Yards would be too small for most skyscrapers.
The reasonable reaction I’ve come to expect from Lemmy users.
Could it possibly be because your argument is shit?
Kilometers are too small for our giant country.
Kilometers aren’t the biggest measurement in metric though.
It goes: Kilometer x1000= Megameter x1000= Gigameter x1000= Terameter. A Terameter is about 1012 meter
Just as it goes smaller like: Milimeter /1000= Micrometer /1000= Nanometer /1000= Picometer
And even those are still not the biggest or smallest measurements possible in metric.
That’s true in theory, but if you talk about megameters to a European you’ll get very weird looks.
An engineer will understand what you mean, but still laugh at you.
But it’s a non-issue for anything on earth, where you’ll have 40.000 kilometers at most. Not a lot of time is spent talking about x thousand kilometer.
Any notion that a kilometer is “too small” is laughable.
I don’t really think it’s slowing us down to have more than one system
Say that to the Mars Climate Orbiter
You still have to know which system you’re using, obviously.
Which would not ever be an issue if you knobheads just switched to metric.
Lol. Dude, with all due respect, did you skip breakfast or something? First, body parts? Take a drink of water, please. You’re dehydrated. Also, although I agree imperial isn’t completely useless, one of its strengths is not because the size of the contental United States. It’s not like miles and kilometers are orders of magnitude different when measuring an identical distance. Lightyears and astronomical units are terrible units to use to describe a drive from LA to NYC for this reason, but is it really that big if a deal between choosing miles and kilometers? I don’t see it that way.
The main reason why I use metric with my work is because I commonly deal in millimeters / sub-inches. If I used inches, everything would be shitty fractions and I hate fractions. To me, metric is just cleaner when increasing or decreasing magnitudes. Which I generally stay within cm and mm.
Within industrial applications, such a building a structure in the US, yeah, it makes sense to stick ti imperial because it is indeed the national unit of measurement. But outside that reason, I don’t find much of a benefit. Coincidentally, I moved off grid 3 weeks ago and am building a cabin way out in the woods. Because its just me and I plan to stay here until my end, I’ll definitely use metric. If I was just developing a place I intended to flip, I’d use Imperial singularly because I’m in the US.
Ad hominim attacks. The bread and butter of Lemmy.
I don’t think you read my response. I wasn’t attacking you at all. I’m not one of those mean shits on here. I certainly meant no aggression.
Also 1L water ~ 1kg
And 1000 cm³ = 1L
Being purposefully stupid and arrogant about it is the single most American thing.
Ah yes, the reason I am teaching myself as an American adult the metric system
We were taught it in my rural red state elementary school in the '80s. Maybe because metrification seemed like a more real possibility, I guess.
A lot of thing’s seemed more possible in the 80’s
Should be pretty easy to learn, right? I mean, that’s the whole point.
except for intuition formed from a lifetime of daily usage
BUT THIS IS HOW WE ALWAYS DID IT
Growing up in the Metric environment, I only have to deal with the Imperial system very rarely before the Internet. But later, I found out there’s a whole country that only use Imperial, and that they almost always demand you convert your system to the one they understand, and almost never bothered with Metric when they write anything. But then again, I found out that they also use units that are totally novel. I just have to accept that this is the character of them, and continue using Metric.
It’s because they believe they’re so exceptional that everything that works for the rest of the world doesn’t work for them.
That includes not only the metric system but also things like healthcare, student debt and gun control.
There is no country that only uses Imperial. Americans use grams for weed. And technically what the US uses is called US Customary. Some units are different from Imperial. Funny thing is both Imperial and US Customary are legally defined in metric.
Yeah measures like a foot were never standardized across countries using imperial before napolean introduced metric, as the french foot was 13 inches or so, making napolean at least as tall as putin and not the 5 1 under that measure.
Probably. Because their understanding of metric is next to none. So they don’t even know what to convert it to. We also often take for granted with that we grow up with.
It wasn’t until I was 25 that I realized woodworking and sewing, isn’t part of the normal elementary school curriculum abroad.
It’s far from easy for someone that grew up in a different system to get a good reference of what different units feel like. It’s the kind of change you need multiple new generations for.
The only reference Americans have for metric is 9mm
The only reference Americans have for metric is 9mm
Way to show your ignorance. We also buy our soda in liters.
I’m having way too much fun with refusing to convert to or even learn that abomination of a system. Whenever a Murrican starts a conversation with inches, feet, ellbows or whatever I ask them what they mean and whether they can convert that to real units please.
Middle Earth?
One of the many failures of American public education system that I was subjected to. It’s speaks volumes about how normalized exceptionalism is in this country.
“Oh, the measurement standard the rest of the world uses? You don’t need to learn that. You’re an American, so people from other countries will just accomodate you because they want to be like us.”
One of the most annoying things in the world are American websites that claim to sell internationally but they only offer USD and all provided measurements are in American imperial.
Right up there with online stores that only have boxes for “state” and “zip code” even if the selected country doesn’t use those.
I was taught the metric system in American elementary school.
I don’t doubt it. My elementary education out in East Bumfuck, New Hampshire in the late 80s/early 90s wasn’t exactly top notch. My third grade teacher taught us that the appendix was located in the leg and banned certain books and items from the classroom for being “satanic”.
Funny, by stereotype the North is supposed to be ahead of the South, yet I got a decent education in North Carolina in the 90’s and early 00’s.
Rural areas of New England are pretty ass-backwards. If you want a decent education, you basically need to live in the Boston Metro area or the seacoast.
Americans are really falling behind these day in all the metrics 😂
We actually use both. Imperial is easier to break into 3rds, but can still break down into other bases easily without any irrational numbers. Metric is more useful for science, but my mom who does landscaping prefers Imperial for her designs because it’s not stuck in base-10.
Europeans are the ones who refuse to learn more than one system lol
It annoys me so much that a small decision could have had me growing up with metric.
Damn Tucker Carlson must’ve stumbled upon this post. Someone should tell him that Russians use metric.
I like metric weight for cooking (on the rare occasion I make something that involves careful measuring, and for my bread making) and MILES can fuck right off, km are fine for measuring long distance. And fine with meters, cm for short distance.
But I do like how feet are 12 inches, because 12 is so evenly divisible, and like that a gallon splits in half and half again and again until you get cups. It’s like RAM,
Cup is 8 oz
Pint is 16 oz
Quart is 32 oz
Half Gallon is 64 oz
Gallon is 128 oz.
That doubling sequence is satisfying.
Your 16 oz pints are a pathetic 455ml. Europeans have 500ml.
Meanwhile a true UK pint is 568ml.
You can see why we cling to Imperialism.
specifically woodworking I like doing in inches, because 12. For the tasks I often do in the wood shop, fractional inches work well.
I’m confortable working in both systems, but I build furniture in inches.
In metric, the 12 really isn’t important anymore which kinda invalidates that. We normally go to the nearest mm or, if needed, some fraction of that (not normally needed in my life at least)
When building wooden furniture, the ability to divide by 3 and 4 comes in handy a lot more often than dividing by 5, and I don’t have to start rounding to nearest or stuff like that. For this task, inches work out better.
If I never see another inch size bolt in my life it’ll be too soon.
I do woodworking too, my father did it since youth, and he did it just fine. We don’t feel the need to divide everything.
My point is, if you’re using feet and inches you maybe want to divide by that. We in the metric world don’t so it’s not that big a deal. Our woodworking is done in CM and MM and we rarely need fractions of mm.
Being a mechanical engineer in the US constantly switching between both systems really sucks. And for much more than just length and temperature
This could’ve been dealt with decades ago if people weren’t afraid of change.
If the brits were able to mostly switch in the 20th century the americans should have been more than able to.
And if the weights didn’t fall into the ocean.
How many British thermal units does it take to heat up a slug of water 1 degree Celsius?
1g water == 1ml water ==
1cm^21cm^3 waterAt 3C. 1 liter at room temperature will be about 2-3g off.
Nah you made it even worse.
Squared centimeters for a volume measurement?
Oops! A mistake, of course
Their 2.5L bottles must be huge
I want to prefer imperial, but using fractions for tools is super fucking annoying when millimeters are easy, and then stores giving me price per ounce in the store, other products price per pound making me do the fucking Mental Math multiplying times 16 pisses me off.
Fractions are a stupid way to measure small distances, and ounces are a stupid way to measure it small amounts of weight.
It’s just a binary search
I could honestly care if Imperial wants to fuck men or women or both, I just don’t want it to be fucking annoying when I’m trying to do work.
But at the same time, fractions are actually a better way to measure precisely. If you need to record a precision that’s greater than a whole unit without being 10x as precise, decimal kinda sucks. If your precision is 1/8 a cm, you either have to round up or imply that the precision is accurate to 0.001 cm.
You can always play with a denominator to show greater precision with fractional measurements (1/8 vs 2/16 vs 8/64), but you can’t easily imply lower precision with decimal.
I do not agreed that fractions are a better way of measuring small distances. Decimals can be broken down infinitesimally. I don’t see anything hard to understand about it, meanwhile fractions you have to like compare and contrast the denominators to find the values or break out some long division or a calculator. Fuck that.
Okay.
How do you describe a measurement of 1 and a quarter of a centimeter precise to 1/4cm without either over-stating or under-stating precision of the measurement?
Decimal only allows you to increase or decrease precision by a factor of 10.
If the Precision is necessary you just break up two decimal points, or however many to get it to where it has to be.
You don’t need to use significant figures to convey precision. You can also explicitly state the uncertainty, like 1.25 ± 0.25 cm.
But even you don’t know how that works.
Because 1/4cm precision would be ± 0.125cm
Touché
American exceptionalism (& imperialism) at it’s finest
They’re really proving it in the comments. Maga loves imperial the most.
