I was genuinely hoping that you were going to say "metric is miles better" there. Disappointing.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
The USA and the metric system
- Thread starter Deleted member 32374
- Start date
I don't think anyone that uses the metric system since a kid has ever had an issue visualizing the height of someone when told in centimeters... my kid is a bit over 90cm and I'm 178, that means I'm almost twice her height and you don't need to start converting feet and inches around :P
You're missing the point. You're just using your kid as a reference point; 180 is twice 90, therefore I'm twice as tall as her. The issue is that you're implicitly bringing in other standards by necessity. The ideal would be to simply know the base unit, and number of units you have. "I have 1 ft, here are six." Instead, in metric it becomes: "I know that this man is 160 cm, therefore 200 cm must be 40cm above this, which is..." And so on. Mentally, large sets of units require extra subdivisions and references that are implicitly done.
I said it because so many people on here were using the boiling point as an absolute and easy to measure and verify metric. Without lab equipment, the boiling point of water is no more accurate than measuring the length of your foot to estimate a 'foot length."
I think you also missed the point of what I said.
I don't need to visualize anything, I know how much is 150cm or 200cm or 178cm all based on my height or other things around that use those same heights (ie., doors).
You use feet and you know how much 6ft is based on some random number and distance, not a real object. Same as centimeters. My point is that when comparing those units, you don't need to mix two scales (inches and feet). That alone makes things easier.
You know how much is 1 feet, I know how much is 50cm. You add those the same way I do. I think you might be assuming people don't understand how much 10, 20 or 50cms is. Everybody does and you don't need references for them, at least not more than anyone using feet does.
This is bullshit. The wind, air humitdity, and amount of sun you're exposed to have so much mor einfluence than 1F, that you can't realistically say you need that much precision. And that's even disregarding that anyway, we can only measure the temperature of a point, not a volumle, and the temperature certainly is not uniform around you. If the weather anounces 75F, you won't always be with 75F air around you.
... That's like, exactly the strength of metric systems? If the number become too big, you just switch to the next unit. And use decimals, which are painless to convert.
(and if you're cooking anyway, just use a scale, you won't have to guess at the size)
Sadly will never happen stuff like the Metric System and Fahrenheit is "their way" to measure them and thats for them more important than logic.
Hell they even call a sport with a egg that is mostly played with hands fucking Football.
Hell they even call a sport with a egg that is mostly played with hands fucking Football.
You're missing my point; a scale is poor if you can't actually use it. I'm saying that proper use of a scale should be able to be used ab initio, from it's actual units. If you have to memorize how much 150cm is to evaluate your size, then you are not using centimeters. You are using your own personal unit of 150 centimeters. You are implicitly creating your own sub-units. Sub-units with the same bizarre conversions you accuse of imperial of having!
If you need to perform this sort of mental musical chairs to evaluate given heights, then it's a unit system not well suited to it's task. And that's why Americans don't want to use it!
If we want to be completely nehlisitc, why even have multiple hierarchy of units at all based on your comment? If you know how much 50cm, or 150cm, why not just measure everything in cm and get rid of meters, kilometers, micro-meters, and everything else completely? We could just rely on knowing 'how much 100cm, 1000cm, 100000cm is', couldn't we?
That of course would be obnoxious. The whole point of unit hierarchy is to keep the number of units small and understandable for each application it's used for.
By the by, 6ft 6inches doesn't mix the units up; they just add. You have 6ft, and on top of that is 6 inches. It's much easier to deal with that '78 inches' which is just too many inches.
... what?
I use 1cm and 1m enough. The scale is properly used. And for things at that size I use those units and then add them up. I said I know how much those centimeters when it comes to measuring people. I use meters as well as kilometers. What you said makes no sense, sorry. I don't think you even understand how using the metric system works...
And if you somehow want to keep the scale low, then use 1.78m, 0.9m and things like that?...
Nobody memorizes how much 150cm is in the way you think we do. It's just certain amounts are ingrained after seeing it frequently, the way probably everybody in the US knows how much 6ft is without having to visualize 1ft first and then add another 5 of those. That was a very weird thing to pick from my comment and try to make a whole point out of.
Last edited:
What liquid do you use, consume, interact with most in your life?
Water. Not brine. Why the fuck would you put the boiling point of brine as the 100 degree mark?!
Water. Not brine. Why the fuck would you put the boiling point of brine as the 100 degree mark?!
... but you do the exact same thing with imperials?Only you have to do with every single unit of distance, as you can't well relate one to another.
Sorry, you're not making much sense.
Which I guess is why you have (*googles*) 1760 yards (or 5280 feets) in a mile?
(In case you didn't read my last post, that's exactly the strength of the metric system, with 10^3 units, AND 10^+/-n for the closest to the main unit. For example, people usually won't say 182 cm, but 1,82 m. As you don't have arbitrary multiplicator between the units, you can convert painlessly between each, and keep your number as small (or big) as you want)
Last edited:
This is a complete non issue. Did you ever hear about SATP conditions ? Everything* in chemistry is standardised to 1013 hPa.
It's still a significantly better scale by any measure than the scientific car crash that is Fahrenheit.
Edit: Of course it needs to be measured in a laboratory. It's still significantly better than a scale that is defined by an ammonium chloride icewater solution and the temperature of a healthy human body.
Last edited:
Let's be honest. It's just about american exceptionalism. You even see it in this thread with people trying to convince you that the imperial system is actually more convenient lol
Be it the am/pm thing, the way you write dates, the imperial system etc... None of these things make any sense in 2018. There are way better systems/ways of doing things out there and 99% of the countries in the World understand that. But 'murica is so unique and exceptional, why should they be like everyone else? Cue USA USA USA chants.
Be it the am/pm thing, the way you write dates, the imperial system etc... None of these things make any sense in 2018. There are way better systems/ways of doing things out there and 99% of the countries in the World understand that. But 'murica is so unique and exceptional, why should they be like everyone else? Cue USA USA USA chants.
Precision without going to the decimal points (the horror) is not a very good metric. you might as well say we need to measure everything in millimeters
People are just resistant to change. I can't be bothered to learn Celsius when I know Fahrenheit so well and easily know at a glance how to dress, weather to bother going out to run etc.
That said, I'd still support changing as a worldwide standard makes more sense and many things about the metric system are superior. In short, I'd learn and adapt if forced, but I'm not going to bother in the meantime.
That said, I'd still support changing as a worldwide standard makes more sense and many things about the metric system are superior. In short, I'd learn and adapt if forced, but I'm not going to bother in the meantime.
I am surprised it was not post earlier.
The strength of the metric system is its coherent and transversal approach.
On a side note, anyone bringing granularity is arguing in bad faith.
The more I try to understand the "advantage" of F instead of C, the more I find F pretty stupid. Seems clear it's just a "pride and habit" thing, especially when the entire world uses the correct system.
This is what it comes down to.
Everything about the imperial system is an absolute mess.
Complaining about minuses in the Celsius scale is particularly hilarious to me.
Like, we teach that to sixth graders. The temperature scale is actually a great analogy for introducing them to negative integers.
User Banned (5 Days): Inflammatory and inappropriate drive-by post, accumulated infractions for similar behavior.
Quick question, what's the imperial measurement for dead kids in school shootings?
Or is stupid. When requiring more precise values using Celsius (medicine, chemistry, etc.), you just use decimals.
A given increase in one scale (say F) is always proportional to the same increase in the other scale, doesn't depend on the temperature range.
I don't see the point of constantly having this thread. If you Eurosnobs want to dunk on the US go over to one of the thousand Trump threads.
Because using them in imperial is less than practical, so of course the same must be true in metrics!
(/s, just in case)
Ah, now we get to the root of the problem, metric people have never seen an egg.
How is Fahrenheit a scientific car crash? It's fundamentally no different from Celsius.
This is the issue. We have a bunch of a-holes around here that just want to prove how smart they are.
In terms of day to day usage there really isn't much difference in usability between Fahrenheit and Celsius.
0 is arguably a more logical number to use for freezing, however, it's not exactly hard to remember 32. Fahrenheit is arguably more granular, however, if that precision was actually necessary you could easily add the .5 decimals to Celsius without losing any usability.
However, there is one thing which indisputably makes Celsius a better system to use:
This is a map which shows the countries which use Fahrenheit in green and those which use Celsius in grey.
Celsius and Fahrenheit are systems of communicating temperature. The entire world has accepted Celsius as the standard, except for the US. That, by definition of being a system of communication, makes it superior to use.
Chosing to use Fahrenheit over Celsius would almost be as dumb as choosing to write the date in a completely different way to the rest of the world.
Oh wait...
I think these two posts cover just about everything.
I hate the way we use both metric and imperial in the UK, it's a confusing hodgepodge.
You probably don't need to go that fine. But we should use centimeters here because that's finer than inches while still useful. Same for kilometers/meters instead of having to subdivide miles haphazardly.
Fahrenheit makes more sense for how the weather feels outside. At 0 it starts feeling cold, at 100 it's become way too hot.
The irony of this whole situation is the comolete and utter lack of ability to understand using something as a scientific measurement (which is what that image is about) and using something as an environmental measurement for day-to-day use while whining about other people's ignorance.