Metric vs Imperial

[Poppavalyim Andropoff]

imperial system is based on metric anyway

 

[Overly Serious]

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.

So when you got drunk and wrote that opening post, how many 568mls of beer had you had?

 

[2mm and 99 others]

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.

You'd get rid of that mind virus by breeding humans who have 6 fingers on each hand.

 

[Dr Naomi Hunter]

Put a man on the moon and then come talk to us.

The Apollo program used the metric system to land on the moon though.

Amerimutts always fall into this trap.

 

[geckogoy]

The Apollo program used the metric system to land on the moon though.

Amerimutts always fall into this trap.

Nah the whole thing was built in amercan customary units, that the computer did that internally is because nasa was gay, but nasa did very little of the actual work

 

[Dr. Eldon Tyrell]

You'd get rid of that mind virus by breeding humans who have 6 fingers on each hand.

Or sift out the speds who count with their fingers. /jk If you count with joints and leave out the thumb or the pinky it's base 16, almost as if knuckle counting must've been a thing in the middle ages... I regret not dicking around with mental math as a kid, because I actually noooticed this stuff intuitively but now I'm kinda stuck with having the common difficulty of holding more than 10 things of any in my mind. Sure, I can do it abstractly, which is the idea of arithmetic but as you already hinted at, the mental capacity to visualize the base is the way you acquire abstraction in the first place.

 

[byron]

It's ironic that the main criticism of Imperial amounts to it being "arbitrary" when actually the opposite is true. Imperial units are human-centric. They work better with your ape brain.

Somewhere I saw a study where they asked a bunch of Americans, and a bunch of Europeans to estimate the lengths of a several pieces of wood. The American estimates were more accurate. Why? It's because, even if you were raised your entire life to use meters and centimeters, your ape brain is better at thinking in terms of a smaller unit.

There is nothing in your ancestral environment that is about one meter long. Nothing! But there is something in your ancestral environment that is about one foot long ...it's called a foot.

"Ah yes. A foot." and use that as a standard of measurement.

This is ironic too, because metric uses base-10, which is the number of fingers we have. "Ah yes, the number of booger-hooks that this upright ape has - let's use that as a standard of conversion" <--- see how two can play at this game?

Imperial has a bunch of units that evolved based on what was useful to humans to serve a particular human purpose.

100000 centimeters in a kilometer may be easier to remember than 63360 inches in a mile, but there is literally zero use-case for this conversion factor.

Yes! Exactly! The only advantage that anyone ever cites for metric is a useless advantage! There's no use-case for it.

This is even more true in an age where everyone has smart phones. Saying "it's easier to do this conversion in my head" is akin to saying, "you must learn to do long division in your head because you wont have a calculator all the time" - turns out that I do have a calculator all the time.

Most of the Imperial measurements are products of 3 or 4.

The term for that is "highly composite" - it means that you can break a number down into many factors. If you have a ruler that is 1 foot long and only has markings for inches (this is a hypothetical to prove the point, so please play along), you can break it down into 1/2 = 6 inches, half it again 1/4 = 3 inches, and one more time in half 1/8 = 1.5 inches.

That's about as far as you can go with that hypothetical ruler. You can look at markings on a ruler and accurately find the halfway point (1.5 inches) but you can't accurately find 0.75 - again the human ape brain just can't do that accurately.

Because 12 is highly composite, you can also do this trick with thirds. 4 inches is 1/3.

10 is less composite. You can cut it in half twice by the rules above: 5 and 2.5. You can cut it into 1/5 ...which is cool I guess, but in practice less useful than cutting a length into 1/3.

The point is, Imperial's highly composite gradations are more practical than metric's.

Truly the white man's way of measurement.

Funny you should mention that. Metric was invented in the 1600's, but was pushed on everyone during the French Revolution. One of their goals was to force people to stop practicing religion. They wanted to split the year up into 10-day weeks. Their stated purpose for doing this was so that nobody would know what day was Sunday and therefore couldn't go to church.

As it happened, that particular change failed. But that kind of subversive, dystopian, control-freak bullshit is not at all what I would call "the white man's way." It reminds me a lot more of how leftists insist on writing CE because they're offended by (white people's tradition of) "anno domini"

 

[Hey Johnny Bravo]

The Apollo program used the metric system to land on the moon though.

Amerimutts always fall into this trap.

So Eurocucks can't even use their own superior system to put a man on the moon? Go sit in the chair, sweaty. Jaykwandairyus will take care of this.

Checkmate, you commies!

 

[Shart Attack]

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.

I'm aware of how those are derived. I work with them every day. I chose that as my example because it's not a unit of measurement most people need to know, so it's relatively obscure. You're describing a refrigeration/chiller ton, by the way, which is equivalent to 12,000 BTU/hr. There's also a cooling tower ton, which is equivalent to 15,000 BTU/hr. But your simple, concise explanations really go to show something that bothers me about metric proselytes. They bitch about how "confusing" and "arbitrary" US customary units are, but if you actually look into how they were derived, there's almost always a perfectly logical explanation.

Metric cucks also seem to think the fact that they don't understand a unit of measurement means that it cannot be understood by anyone. They try to introduce irrelevant complications as a way to make a US customary unit sound more subjective than it is, because if they can't understand it, no one else should be allowed to understand it, either. "What do you mean, horsepower? Different horses can carry different loads! Are you measuring it at sea level or the peak of Mount Everest? The gravity constant is different at different altitudes! What was the horse's name?!" Meanwhile millions of guys with GEDs have been able to use horsepower as a shorthand way to get the torque they need for their pump for over a century. You'd think that would prove it's a perfectly usable and understandable unit of measurement, but the metric cuck is immune to that kind of logic, which is ironic considering their praise for the cold logic of their base-10 mind prison.

 

[Raven of the Burning God]

I'm aware of how those are derived. I work with them every day.

The thing I find weird is that I have had conversations with tradespeople who grew up on metric and you'll say something about "feet of pump head" and after the Fucking Americans has simmered down and they find out what it means they're like "oh, hey, that's actually really useful"... but the weird part is that they didn't already have a concept of "meters of pump head", or whatever metric version.

I have a couple more recent occasions where I've said "meters of pump head" and I get nearly the same reaction.

It makes me wonder what sort of mental overhead our Yuropeen frens have to deal with because they've lost all these highly functional derived units since the bookish nerds who came up with SI had no feel for measuring everyday things as a practical activity and would lose their shit over measuring the volume of lumber in board-meters just as much as board-foot. Or if you talked about wood's residual moisture content in terms of kg/board-meter.

I have a feeling some inflated savant talked to a tradie and felt stupid because he didn't understand the utility of all the specialized customary units and made it a lifequest to fuck it all up with metric.

 

[Dr. Eldon Tyrell]

meters of pump head

Millimeter Wassersäule?

 

[Raven of the Burning God]

Millimeter Wassersäule?

Sure, though milimeter would be a very small differential pressure.

 

[N Space]

Virtually all arguments in favor of the imperial system can be summarized as 'It's intuitive and it has worked for me all my life so why bother changing to metric'. Those claiming it's useful because it's base 12 are lying because the scaling between units is rarely 12 and sometimes isn't even divisible by 3, for example, one mile is 1760 yards which isn't divisible by 3 or a pound is 16 ounces which is also not divisible by 3. Another big issue is the lack of consistency between different kinds of units, for example, a liter is simply a cubic decimeter but the gallon, quart, pint or fluid ounce aren't the cube of any imperial length units. At last, the imperial system simply lacks units for things like voltage, current or luminosity so the use of metric is mandatory there.

Edit: The prefixes in metric are so useful that they're commonly used in conjunction with imperial units

 

[Taser Confetti]

I'm used to imperial because I'm America. That being said it's pretty fucking retarded for only three countries in the world to use one system.

Wish the whole world used 24hr time as well.

 

[Pelican Bones]

"Using measurements based on everyday human experiences like the length of one pace doesn't make any sense. I only understand 1/10,000,000th the distance from the north pole to the equator as described by a line running through the center of Paris." -literal homosexuals