Metric vs Imperial

Metric is for nerds in a laboratory. Imperial is for getting stuff done IRL. Yes, it's important for nerds to get super precise measurements when they're inventing drugs or measuring the distance between stars. But it's also important to be able to divide your unit of length by 3 exactly, over 1000 times a day in a store. Or to half a recipe without needing a scale. Or to sail a ship with the Earth's curvature baked into your map-following distances. Or to estimate your distance traveled using only your number of steps, or to build a shelter in the woods using base12 measurements.
 
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hog cranking frog said:
Imperial is base 12. Makes for a much easier time working off the cuff building things.
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Same reason time is base 12. Easier to divide that base into consistent blocks that match the change in position of the sun in the sky. Minutes and seconds are base 60. which is 12x5. How many digits on each hand?

Also true of the old LSD coinage, 240 pence in a pound, or 12 shillings.
 
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Travis Touchdown (REAL) said:
I hate the Imperial system so much it's unreal. I'm not even bad at fractions or anything; it's just crazy to me that you people will be like "Ah yes. A foot." and use that as a standard of measurement. My ass has huge Frankenstein feet, any house I would've constructed during the colonization of America would've looked like a Tim Burrton set using that standard of measurement. Metric is just such an optimal system of measurement. Truly the white man's way of measurement.
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Put a man on the moon and then come talk to us.
 
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I live and measure in both worlds on the daily, but I've come to a compromise in my head I call "Metperial" where I replicate the useful imperial measurements that people (even metric natives like the French) tend to think in I know a inch is 25.4mm but to simply things it's 25mm, 4in is 101.6mm but it's 100mm a foot is 304.8mm but in reality it's 300mm etc.

Now when I am working to a standard that's different I will work to it in the measurement system provided, and I am a guy who turns a lot of whitworth threads, while I think the Imperial system is very human and it's thinking / thought system needs to be preserved as does the nomenclature and rough units the fractional inch system like 16th's 32nds, 64ths, 128'ths etc needs to die and while useful the thou system needs to go for anything other than historic units.

What does need revising on the Metric side of things is reliance on pure mathematics, and real world results need to be accounted for in ISO, DIN an newer EN standards (the ones I work in, American stuff isn't that applicable tome) One industry that most people don't understand works in a really weird mix of metric an imperial is the film industry - they tried replacing 1/4 whit threaded lights an camera studs with m6x1 threads and it was a disaster because it added time to breaking down the set or rejigging in a seriously measurable manner and while Camera an focal lengths an light measurements all work in metric the sets are designed an layed out in imperial because that fits human thinking more.

The thing is I've reluctantly came to this point of view over years of practical work hell there was a serious metrification movement in British Industry in the early 1900's it only petered out when people rightly said "Bit French isn't it" and well everything we've got is already in inches an that works well an is really well defined it would add confusion to the mix, and were making everything that matters so lets stick with Imperial for now an come up with a plan.

The plan turned into the metrification mess of the 70's an it caused more harm than good, without respecting established norms that was quickly rolled back on and then back an forth for decades even to today, I was born in 85 an learned both systems in school and in my house we used both systems kinda interchangeably but if it get's below 1/4 of a inch my mum had to stop an read a ruler (measuring stuff with any fidelity has never been a strong suit for her) an she often didnt have to get much finer than that but was gret at mass conversions lile ml to pints, half pints quaters gills etc because she liked to cook and with my dad it was any mearuement and he'd do it in his head.
So I grew up being able to do the same.

The issue is with metric is doesn't have useful names or points of reference between CM an M Imperial does but its also got a lot of baggage that needs to be streamlined so a merger of the two is likely the best option.
 
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I learned both and the only imperial I'm good with is thousandths of an inch on a mill or lathe and 6" vs 12" when getting a sandwich.
Fun fact interstate 19 is the only to use metric
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twelve is the most based base. metric was a mistake. imperial is half way there. base 10 is a mind virus, it makes you retarded by introducing unnecessary fractions.
This isn't cope for sucking at math, even if you are great at mental math, you could compute bigger numbers easier. Basically, what makes me angry is that no one cares to optimize mental math for humans.
 
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Save the Loli said:
dumb shit like an "acre foot" which doesn't even make sense
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You are a farmer with 100 acres of a crop that requires 30 inches of water for the growing season. For some reason you are trying to grow crops in a godforsaken desert that only gets 6 inches of rain during the growing season. How much water should you budget for your irrigation costs? If you answered 246696.36751 cubic meters, huzzah, metric! 200 acre-foot is a somewhat nicer number to work with.

Granted if you were growing 400000 square meters of a crop that needed 75 centimeters of water and only got 15 centimeters of rain, I guess 2.4 million m²-cm would be pretty straightforward to convert to 240000 cubic meters. But the use of SI prefixes means you'd possibly run into people saying they needed 2400km²-cm, which if someone interprets it as kilometers²-centimeter rather than kilo(meter²-centimeter) gives you a hilariously too large amount of water.

And, yes, you do run into dumb shit like that when people try to actually USE metric in ways that make sense for their everyday purposes because the scale of SI units aren't very convenient for human-sized problems. Because SI units aren't based on humans. They're based on one 10 millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator on a line passing through Paris, France. What a ridiculous basis for a system of measurement.

Shart Attack said:
A lot of US units have some obscure or archaic derivations, like tons of cooling or feet of pump head.
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You have a water tank on the top of an apartment building. The inlet of the tank is 100 feet above your water source. You have two pumps on-hand you could install. One has a discharge pressure of 30 psi and one has a discharge pressure of 40psi. Which should you use? 40psi is only about 90 feet of pump head, neither pump alone would be adequate for this application. But, man, how much quicker would it have been if the discharge pressure was just stated in feet of head to begin with?

Back in the days when people preserved things in an "ice box" that was literally an insulated box with a large block of ice, rating a refrigeration system in how many tons of ice it could produce for market was probably a great sales pitch. Same with describing what a motor or engine could do for a farmer in "horsepower", since whatever work it would be replacing was powered by literal horses at the time.

Rudy Coleman said:
how tall are you?
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About 18 hands, give or take a finger.
 
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We Are The Witches said:
Since people in the west are accustomed to base-10 and operations involving those, it seems more efficient to standardize measurements to systems that work easily with them; e.g:
  • 1.5 feet is 18 inches.
  • 1.5 meters is 150 centimeters.
So for humans accustomed to the latter, it takes less processing power and so it's usually more efficient.

If your average person's brain was a PC and both operations a script, the "metric script" would be the preferred one for most cases because it's more adapted to how the PC works and therefore faster (as an analogy to what involves people in general, maybe not ancient babylonians).
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If society were even optimised around the "average" person's intelligence I would still be frustrated. But it's currently optimised around even lower than that. Complexity is more often moved around than eliminated; and so when we decimalise the currency so that the less mathematically capable can just divide by ten, greater complexity is heaped on me because I can no longer use factors of 3, 4, 6, 8, 12...

And even if there's an initial steeper learning curve most people soon habituate to it. There was an interesting post earlier about how the Celts used base twenty and the Germans used to count on their knuckles excluding the thumb for base eight. Things like this being the reason we have "eleven" and "twelve" rather than "oneteen" and "twoteen".

Decimalisation is a historical example of dumbing down society.

This isn't an endorsement of the Imperial system or the US variant of it. Standards are still good and non-metric is filled with inconsistent terminology and regional variations and issues with scaling. But I'd be quite happy if Metric had been less focused on the sort of efficiency you talk about.
 
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Rudy Coleman said:
are you sure there isnt another measurement named after a body part that MOST people use instinctively to measure their height
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@Raven of the Burning God is clearly a horse, given that hands are the traditional unit of measurement for equines. I guess because you can't get a horse to lie down while you walk up and down it.

Phalanges Mycologist said:
The issue is with metric is doesn't have useful names or points of reference between CM an M Imperial does but its also got a lot of baggage that needs to be streamlined so a merger of the two is likely the best option.
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So lets do it. Lets brainstorm out Imperial Metric. Not only does "Imperial Metric" sound grandly Roman Republic, it's a fun exercise.

We'd need measurements for mass, volume, pressure, length. Lets skip volume for now. :) And what we should have is greater consistency of naming, like metric has, and some better degree of scaling even if we concede that changing units between scales has some merit to it that metric misplaced.
 
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Hello all, I am the OP and I would like to say that I was very drunk when I wrote the OP and that's why it reads like schizophrenic nonsense. I have not read a single reply to this thread either. With all of that said however, I still hate the Imperial system of measurement and I am sober at the time of making this statement. That is all.

edit: nevermind I actually read my op and it's way more coherent than I thought it was. fuck you imperial cuck, count to ten retard.
 
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