- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?
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From John Bazell “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
But we’re supposed to use Joules, not calories
There’s a popular argument against religion that essentially says that if any trace of a specific religion were wiped off the face of the Earth, it would never come back. As in there’d probably be something in its place, but there’d be no way that the specific beliefs practiced by that religion would ever return. Whereas if a piece of scientific knowledge were similarly wiped from human knowledge, it would eventually be rediscovered.
A similar argument can be made with the metric system: I think that if standardized measurement systems disappeared from the face of the Earth today, something extremely similar would eventually be invented and adopted. It’s just too internally consistent and human mental math too grounded in decimal for it not to be. You’d probably even end up with a prefix-based (probably even Greek) naming scheme.
Now consider USC: the units fail to fit together in basically any meaningful way. They try but fail to be base-2, so you can’t even come at it from the already-tenuous angle of base-2 being better than base-10 (e.g. volume skips what two quarts would be, weight is more like base-16 (???), and distance just does something so insane that probably 95% of American adults couldn’t tell you how many feet there are in a mile). There are dozens of completely arbitrary, unintuitive, antiquated-sounding names (e.g. “horsepower”). Although the bases for metric measurements are rather arbitrary, they are extraordinarily precise, so much so that USC bases its own measurements off of insane but precise multiples of metric units. That’s not to say that humans would jump straight to metric or anything, but moreso that whatever would fill USC’s role as an intermediary between nothing and the metric-like system would likey be unrecognizable from current USC.
I would agree with you that something similar to metric would eventually arise, but I would consider duodecimal to make more sense than decimal, as 12 is a superior highly composite number and the terminating representation is much shorter for more commonly used fractions (e.g. 1⁄4 would be represented as 0.3, 1⁄3 as 0.4, 1⁄2 as 0.6, etc). I would also argue that groupings in powers of 12² make more sense than 10³.
I would also argue that it would make more sense for measurements to be based on natural units (such as Planck length) for all the basic measurements (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela), such that the anthropic unit (the one you’d most commonly refer to without prefixes) would be some multiple of 12 away from the natural unit.
I mean, 1btu is required per pound of water per degree Farenheit. About 8lbs/gal and raising it 142°f would mean 1136btus
that’s a lot of words and numbers for, “go fuck yourself”
So intuitive!
Or they answer in BTUs. But ask them which BTU they’re using, and they won’t know.
Calorie? Are they part of metric system? Everyone uses Joule.
Calories are metric but not SI.
… weighs one gram … An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say “An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it” (far less elegant) – but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.
Applied to a real situation I’ve been through :
- my pool 4.5m wide, 9m long and 1.5m deep, the current level of salt is 2.5g/l and a bag of salt weight 20kg. How many bags of salt do I need to bring the level to 3g/l ?
- OR: my pool 14’9" wide, 29’6" long and 5’ deep, the current level of salt is 2500ppm and a bag of salt weights 40lbs. How many bags of salt do I need to bring the level to 3000ppm ?
The answer to one is 1.5 bag, the answer to the other one is “fuck that, I’m getting 8 bags at the store and it should be good enough”
centigrade
and he was doing so well until this abomination 😡
What was the point of this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?
Capital owners that don’t want to retool for a bullshit reason like “common good”.
It literally costs them more money to not use the global standards!
In the long run, maybe. short term is all that matters. And short term it costs money
The idea that a simpler system of weights and measures that operate in base-10 will somehow cripple America is somehow fucking hilarious.
I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅
Lab rat here. I got you fam! Let’s collectively believe that BTU’s are real!
Wait…
Uuummm… Ackshually Americans don’t use imperial units, they use united States customary units. Which are similar, but just a smidge different.
Try farming in Canada. I will actually use liters per acre as a unit to measure in liquid fertilizer into a sprayer, spray it at gallons per acre and drive the sprayer at kph with a pump pressure in PSI on a field that was surveyed in rods.
It’ll get harvested by a machine that has all metric bolts and uses a 30’ cutting platform, the grain will be measured in bushels on the yield monitor and sold in $/bushel with the selling agent but the contract will be in tonnes and delivered that way.
It’s possible! We can switch! I’m US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.
Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I’ve been shocked at how many people don’t realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using “Mexico units” once… Also, I’ve met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is… uh… interesting. The arguments y’all are having here are way more advanced than what I’ve run into.
For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that’s it. The weather says it’s 25c outside? Don’t convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Over time you’ll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.
Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…
It’s also helpful to remember that water boils at 100C and your body temp is about 36-37C. Helps me when I see the weather or something.
Room temp is ~21 degrees. That helped me a lot.
I wish
Someone needs a heat pump!
deleted by creator
36.6°C. 37°C is on edge of healthy.
We actually were transitioning to metric when Carter was president and making progress. We did a lot of dual markings like highway signs, weather reports, etc.
The we ejected Reagan. And metric is used for pop and drugs.
Drug dealers just know what units system is superior
Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…
Biunitated?
For me it was particularly easy as it’s only Chevy and Ford cars that still use the imperial system for nuts and bolts so I’ve been making use of the metric system for pretty much every car I’ve worked on and I never really understood ferinhight to start off with as I only really cared about is it going to snow temperature wise so why memorize a number for something your only going to check one time in the year now that I’ve gotten accustomed to Celsius I’m now paying attention to if it’s going to rain or not
Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn’t the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).
The more I read about America, the more I realise what a fucking stupid country it was, is, and will probably keep on being.
Hence the effort to defund education.
As if people weren’t so fuckin dumb already.
Christ WTF year are we fucking in you guys?
uncle sam you dense motherfucker go to SCHOOL
As an American who lives and travels on a sailboat, it’s sooooo much easier to just be normal and think in metric.
Foreigners (who aren’t sailors) are always amazed when they meet an American that can speak metric.
Why the US refuses to get in bed with the rest of the world is beyond me. Stupid AF I guess …
There are multiple copies of this posted in the cabinet shop where I work. In Canada.
The medical system ended up using the metric system anyway
America has medical system?
It’s more a system of an abuse and profit than speficially “medical”. That anyone gets better is purely a marketing/sales feature.
Ah, you mean private medicine. When people talk about some country’s healthcare, they talk about about what state provides for its citizens.
Nope, that’s why they didn’t duck up with it
How many centimeters in a kilometer?
How many inches in a mile?
American answer: “Shut up, Euro-freak. I’m trying to watch Big Bang Theory reruns.”
Strange how you can easily work out the former, but the latter could be anything from 28 to 56285794
🤔
Ugh, who wants to change to a base-10 system when we keep what ever we have now?
I mean there’s really only four ways people use imperial over metric
For cooking, For weighing themselves, For measuring distances, For measuring temperature.
For most other purposes, especially where scientific accuracy is called for, Americans are perfectly aware of and capable of using metric, and mostly do so.
Metric pushing at this point is basically bashing non academics for continuing to use a colloquial measurement that serves them just fine for what they actually need to measure and visualize on a daily basis.
You forgot one: Fasteners, i.e. nuts and bolts, when all the rest of the world has been metric for decades and whatever it is you’re taking apart almost certainly uses metric bolts (car, appliance, electronic device, whatever). But your local hardware store still gives you attitude over metric being ‘’‘’‘’‘‘specialty’’‘’‘’‘’ and the majority of their selection of bolts and machine screws are fractional inch which will not fit approximately 99.8% of all manufactured goods from the last century, let alone this one.
Having two sets of wrenches and sockets is absolute worst. Especially when it seems like 10mm does 80% of the work but is missing 100% of the time
I found a 10 pack of 10mm once. Bought it immediately thinking I’d never need another 10.
That was 5 years ago. I have 2 left…
Those 10mm are pros at hide-and-seek.
At least be consistent with it too! I don’t know what it’s like in the States but internationally we don’t get 7/16" bolts or whatever, we get 10-gauge or 8-gauge etc. What the fuck does that mean?? And wiring too: no 8mm wire, no no let’s have 6AWG. Jesus christ it’s like they enjoy making life difficult.
Imperial is intermixed woth metric in constructionnand a ton of engineering projects as materials are still manufactured in imperial measurements. Farming is still stuck in imperial too.
Both are still around because an entire industry changing fundamental measurements is a lot of effort.
My second favorite example of the two living in harmony for the average US citizen is the liquir store. Beer comes in ounces but hard liquir and wine comes in metric.
My favorite is soda, which comes in 20 oz and 2 liter bottles on the same shelf. People opposed to the metric system tend to ignore the fact that they are already using it somewhere in their lives and just don’t notice.
Mine is that the most rabidly anti metric folks stateside are likely to be weapons enthusiasts who measure ammo calibur in metric.
My favorite weird imperial/metric oddity in the US is 16.9 ounce bottles. People refer to them as “sixteen point 9 ounce” bottles. They’re 500ml. It’d be so much easier just to say “500 em ell”
Nope, beer is measured in Fluid Ounces which is a measure of volume and is entirely unrelated to ounces except for having the same name. Oh also a fluid ounce is a different amount of volume depending on the context. It’s a greeeeaaaaat system.
That is an interesting clarification, not a correction, because nobody calls them “12 fluid ounce cans.”
Cooking has largely moved to metric (with the exception of spices/seasonings, weighing spices is tedious compared to spoons IMO)
I have never seen a US cookbook or Internet recipe site that defaults to metric.
I clicked the King Arthur link and the recipes default to English with metric in parenthesis.
That depends more on the setting, IDK about professional kitchens but most home cooking I’ve seen measures in imperial.
A decent chunk of recipes I use are for baking (where weighing is important and grams are standard) so YMMV, though I don’t generally eat a lot of “american” food so my perspective is a bit skewed toward metric.
Tbf a decent amount of “american food” is prepared by intuition rather than by formula
If you’re checking measurements for a burger, it’s for the individual stacked items you’re putting together on the burger and not usually for how much ground meat you need to get off a chuck steak for the burger you want.
I only write down measurements in my own recipes because I’m chronically paranoid I’ll fuck everything up since so much of my stuff is already mishmash of previous recipes (just finished putting together a non dairy Knaffeh recipe so my SO can have it in spite of their allergies, had to figure out how to mimic Arrakawi cheese using fake mozz lol XD)
Well, yeah. We are trying to make things easier for You.
Oh yeah, because constantly forcing a change it’s obvious nobody you’re trying to force it on cares about is definitely making things easier for them.
1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg. 1kg (of anything) is 1000g. 1g of water is 1cm³. Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column. This column exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base. To heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal. And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.
I’ve posted this before on my mastodon, and on feddit.de, before the instance was shut down, but I think it’s still a nice showcase how SI units interact with one another.
The worst thing we have in the metric system is kWh/1000h. It’s just watts, but whoever designed the energy labels thought a bunch of zeros would be funny or something.
The kWh/1000h does convey more information than just W though. If I buy a fridge and it says 100W I wouldn’t know if that’s its max power draw or average over time. With the 1000h in there it’s pretty clear we are talking about the average.
Also people who aren’t technically minded might only know “kWh” as that’s what it states on your power bill and they can directly guess what kind of energy bill this fridge might cause.
So you are technically correct I guess and we all know that’s the best kind of correct.
We do have worse stuff in the metric system though, kcal is not the same as the SI for energy (J) for example. Also everything involving time gets messy quickly. Nothing compared to the imperial measurements obviously
Fuck that, we should be measuring everything in Stone.
I’ll take a seventh stone of chicken please.
And lengths in Royal cubits.
If we’re gonna go weird we need to go all the way.
