I find imperial vs metric to be a question of practicality vs ideality, and as an engineer I tend towards the former. Either way it doesn’t really matter, because unit conversions are easy math, and a good engineer can work in any unit system.
In defense of imperial, to balance things out here:
I almost never need to go from inches to feet to yards to miles. Conversions like that play almost no role in my daily life. Easily going from mm to cm to m to km is a solution in need of a problem.
Because imperial isn’t bound by a constant conversion factor, you can use several points of reference. An inch is about the size of one knuckle. A foot is roughly the size of… A foot. Most of the time, I don’t need anything more than this. Although to be fair, I rarely need this even. Smaller than an inch is all metric though, easily.
Imperial is sometimes more convenient. Twelve seems like an usual number for inches to feet, but twelve is also easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. I can instantly convert from fractional feet to inches for the most common fractions.
I’m going to say it, both temperature scales make sense. Celsius being based on water makes a lot of sense, it’s the most ubiquitous substance. Fahrenheit makes sense too in terms of climate and the weather that people experience – it’s harder to go more simple than 0 = very cold and 100 = very hot.
Conversions actually aren’t universally good for metric. Joules are great for abstract concepts, but not so much more realistic matters. The energy required to raise 1 g of water by 1 deg C is 4.184 Joules – or more simply, 1 calorie. Calorie is actually neither imperial nor metric. Metric here loses the intuitiveness of water, while SI takes a big W. Another example, mass and weight. In metric, 1 kg is 9.8 Newtons. Most places don’t bother with Newtons and stick to kg. In imperial, 1 pound mass is 1 pound weight. They have been set equal to each other by definition. Mass to weight calculations will always be much easier in imperial, and that’s rather nice for looking at chemistry and flowrates and equipment requirements.
Imperial is better for K-12 education, another unpopular opinion. It requires children to learn going from inches to feet to yards, which uses math far more regularly than metric does. For lengths, it’s great for teaching fractions. Unit conversions between systems are taught often, which gives students a basis when you’re converting other units, like moles and kilograms in chemistry.
It teaches you to always label your fucking units. It’s incredibly bad engineering practice to do this, even if you work solely in one unit system, because you almost certainly aren’t using just one unit. Hell when it comes to pressure, with kPa, psi, atmospheres, and bar, it really doesn’t matter what unit system you’re using.
Metric defines some units in a way that’s good for science but bad for everyday life. A pascal is 1 newton of force per square meter. Our atmosphere is 101,125 Pascals. You see kPa used constantly because the defined unit is absurdly small. The same goes for a Joule, it’s the work done to move a 1 newton object 1 meter. Chemical reaction energy is measured on the basis of kJ per mole (or kg). The defined unit is really small.
TLDR: Convenience + Practicality vs Ideality + Logic
Yeah it’s disappointing. Several weeks ago, it would’ve been upvoted not because people agreed with it, but because it contributed to a thoughtful discussion. I’m an engineer. I’ve probably had to explicitly consider and think about units more in a year than most people here have in their lifetimes.
I just can’t wrap my head around this thread. You’d think Americans were math geniuses by age 12 with how hard they’re making this out to be.
Either way it doesn’t really matter, because unit conversions are easy math, and a good engineer can work in any unit system.
In defense of imperial, to balance things out here:
It’s baffling that someone would spend so long on a critique while completely missing the point. My argument has never been that imperial is better than metric. I regularly use both, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both. The advantages of metric here have been covered ad nauseum, so there was no need for me to mention them again. And since engineering is a field that intimately deals with both unit systems, I thought it would be good to offer that perspective
I was clearly right to offer that perspective, because the majority of your argument focuses on ideality and exactness. Engineering doesn’t deal with ideality or absolute precision. A scientist uses just the right amount of tape to patch a hole. An engineer eyeballs it, adds more tape as needed, and calls it good enough. I don’t need my feet to exactly be 1 imperial foot or for my knuckle to be exactly 1 imperial inch. As long as it’s within 75-125% of it, I’ve got the right ballpark. And if it’s closer to 50% or 150%? I can do simple math to scale it.
Thank you for illustrating my point on how this thread is an emulation of Reddit, complete with arrogant arguments which miss the OP’s point and also fundamentally misunderstanding their perspective. Plus, not even understanding parts of their argument apparently – I didn’t label 0 or 100 when talking about temperature because I was talking about the abstract number itself. That should have been obvious from me talking about the simplicity of using 0 for very cold and 100 for very hot.
It also just occurred to me that I was thinking only of American engineers. You’re completely right that in other countries, for most applications, engineers wouldn’t need to know the imperial system. Constantly working between the two would mostly be unique to American counterparts.
This certainly explains the difference in opinion and experiences.
It’s not entirely without logic. Base 12 is actually better that base 10 for a start, as it allows for a lot more fractions that have clean representations, so 12 inches in a foot is fine. The next thing is that people seem to think we have all of these strange units with strange conversions, when in reality we have 3 units for short distances, and then a seperate unit for long distances. 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and then nobody cares how long a mile is in terms of feet or yards. Once you realize that the mile is not even really part of the same measuring system as inches, feet and yards, the weird conversion makes sense. We exclusively use miles to talk about long distances above 0.1 miles, and then yards are used below 500 yards (which has an overlap of 324 yards). And then for the logic, it is entirely based on actual human scale shit. A foot is called a foot because it is roughly the size of your foot. A yard is approximately how long one stride is. Saying something is 100 yards away means it is approximate 100 steps away. Obviously there will be a bit of variance for how accurate that will be for any given person (and children will have to base it off of an adult obviously), but because it is based more on human things it is more useful for measuring human scale things. It was designed to not use decimals or large numbers because humans don’t comprehend those very well.
Everyone focuses on why learning metric would be better in the first place, and they’re right. No one has come up with a good argument for me to throw away all of my measuring tools, convert all my recipes and relearn an entirely new system when the system and stuff I have works for me now.
Because otherwise it will be difficult to live in a country that has converted to metric, presumably. While I’m not pushing for us to change to metric (even though I know it would be good), I suspect the change would be fairly easy to adjust to.
Every time anyone talks about this, I feel obligated to inform them: there’s also a counting system that’s not based on ten, and it’s way superior. Do people know about it? Most don’t. The Wikipedia page stupidly calls it the “ten-plus-two” system, and there have been heated arguments there with the dumbasses who refuse to change it to the logical name. That’s how stupidly-biased people are towards the ten-based system.
You make a “metric” measurement system based on 12-based counting and then everyone wins. Everyone. It’ll never happen of course.
Sumerians picked base 60, which is the minimum common multiple of “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6”, which is far superior to either 10 (MCM of only “1, 2, 5”), or 12 (MCM of “1, 2, 3, 4”).
But the average people had trouble counting to 60, so they used their fingers… which happen to be 10, which happens to be 1/6 of 60… and they called it “good enough”.
We still use base 60 for minutes and seconds, base 660 (360) for angular degrees, and base 212 (24) for hours… which is at least something.
Base 60 isn’t superior or even reasonable for human mathematical operations. It’s not like 5 is as important of a number as 6. If we all had 6 fingers, 5 would be treated in the same way that 7 is.
I don’t think you understand. You want a small base if you want to do everyday human operations. I guess it might be hard for a lot of people to comprehend because you’re so used to thinking in tens, that you don’t realize that if you stopped dividing 60 by 10 automatically, “60” would not be a digestible base number.
Furthermore, “using 60 a lot” is not the same as counting base-60. Base-60 means there is no ten to fall back on. 60 would be your “small group” number, and that would be that.
Let’s say I counted: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y 10 11 12 13…
2*u=10, u0/3=a0, A/7=5
No need to “divide by 10”, and we even have enough symbols already. All it would take is getting used to… just like what we did for years over and over in primary.
For “everyday human operations” you can just count: 0 5 a f k p u A F K P U 10… or 0 6 c i o u B H N T 10… or 0 a k u A K U 10… or 0 c o B N 10… or 0 f K 10… and so on. Notice how division by any multiple of 2, 3, 5, becomes much easier:
Going back all the way to your original comment. Counting to 60 is not the same as counting base-60, unlike this comment and a ton of your replies. 60 minutes in an hour isn’t base-60 counting. Unless you write one sixty as “10” and two sixties as “20”, you are not counting base-60. Because the tens digit means one group— no matter the size— and the zero after it means none extra. For the love of god please read a book.
Gonna take a shit on this idea like a good American and say dealing with fractions is easier than irrational decimals. I do like the metric system tho and I wish we would switch at least some things like temp and road speed over.
I never understood how it’s much easier to work with “three eights of an inch” than with one centimeter. Or how 6ft3 is easier to work with than 1.90m. The first one combines two measurement units and has very bad accuracy, the second one is straight forward dealing with fractions of itself and can be made even more precise if needed.
I doubt that very much. Just yesterday I checked out the product page of the new DJI Air 3 and compared it with the Air 2. One of the new features is a bigger sensor compared to the old one. So I wanted to see how much bigger it got. For some reason though DJI only lists their sensor sizes in fractions. The Air 3 has a sensor size of 1/1.3 Inch and the Air 2 1/2 Inch. To be honest. I thought shortly about that and then concluded I would have to do math to compare those two and did something else with my life. I know how to convert between different bases but honestly - why should I? This is weird! Why use random switching fractions for anything? Fractions are only useful to display numbers that would be hard to express in decimal. And that is mainly 1/3 and 2/3! Which to be honest I dont encounter that much in my life.
I’m steel-manning the argument for sticking with US Standard. I think there is a lot more precision inherent in how the system functions that you don’t really get in every day uses. Even so, I would rather deal with meters and liters because I hate having to convert between the two systems and metric seems to have won anyway.
I really dont get why it should be more precise… Precision is dependent on my measurement and calculation. How can it be dependent on units? (if you smaller units as needed by your measurement and calculation)
The problem isn’t exactly fractions or decimals, you can present the SI system in fractions as well. The issue is unit conversion. If you want to go from centimeter to meter to kilometer it’s very simple because all base unit conversion are a multiple of 10. But if you want to go from inch (the rough equivalent to centimeter) to feet (rough equivalent to meter) then that’s a division by 12 and if you want to go from feet to mile (rough equivalent to kilometer) then that’s a division by 5280 which is a fuck-all number that nobody is going to remember. So instead you have to remember feet to chain and then chain to furlong and then furlong to mile. And this is just one unit in one dimension. For derived unit conversions the imperial system can fuck right off because it’s going to get needlessly complex.
They’re saying that the only way you can keep neat and easy conversions between same-dimension units is by maintaining a lot of those deprecated units such as furlongs or chains, because by removing them, now you end up with complete nonsense conversions.
It’s not that a system based on base 6 would be strange. That’d be a logical system, too. Just as any other system that consistently uses a particular base.
However, a system that uses numbers of base whatever but then proceeds to jump from one unit to the next one in completely arbitrarily sized steps such as 3; 22; 10; 8; 3 is illogical in any base.
That’s literally the same way with any other base. We just defined orders of magnitudes to be multiples of 10 because we use base 10. We could just as well have used other multiples.
Mostly because it’s very easy to make calculation on base 10. If i ask you to tell me how many millimeters are in 5.7 meters you could probably reply easily without a calculator. You probably wouldn’t do it as easily if it wasn’t base 10
We define 1000 mm as one meter as we are base 10 centric. If we live in a base 8 world, we would have define 8x8x8 mm as one metre and the answer to 5.7 m base 8 would be 5700mm base 8 too
It’s not fundamentally easier to do calculations in base 10. It’s only easier for us because that’s what we learn as children.
If our number system was based on a superior base, like dozenal or senary, we would be able to do calculations on that base easily and would find working in tens awkward.
Base 12 is way more logical than base 10, I bet aliens would think we’re stupid for counting in base 10 just because we have 10 fingers, my opinion on this is infallible fight me
Base 12 is as arbitrary as base 10 and we don’t know what aliens would think nor should we care. Base 16 makes more sense because it is 2x2x2x2 instead of 2x2x3
A base based on 2^x makes the most sense since it’s easy to do conversions between bases that match that template. So base 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. The limit would just be how many symbols can be easily remembered and instantly recognizable (need 32 symbols for base 32).
The Egyptians and Babylonians counted in base 12. They did so by counting each section of the fingers on one hand with their thumb (4 fingers, 3 sections each = 12).
True! And that’s probably why we use base 10, also we have 10 fingers. But that’s usually the argument for base 12. I think we do ok using it in just certain cases, like time and inches.
The way base 12 would work is that you’d add 2 characters and you would write “12” as 10. Which looks really confusing because we’re all used to base 10. If you were then to do 1010 in base 12 (so in base10 that would be 1212) you’d get 100 (144 in base10) so this still stands whatever base you use.
That’s incorrect. Any base system has the same property. For base 12, we would just have two extra digits, and we would be counting powers of 12 instead of powers of 10. Let’s say those extra digits are X for ten and Y for 11. We would write numbers like so (starting with zero and incrementing by one): 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, Y, 10, 11, 12, …, 18, 19, 1X, 1Y, 20, 21, …, 29, 2X, 2Y, 30, …
For example, in base 10, a number 265 means we have 10² twice and 10¹ six times and 10⁰ five times (100 + 100 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1).
Same number in base 12 has 12² once and 12¹ ten times and 12⁰ once (144 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 1).
A “round” four-digit number in base ten is written as 1000 (written in base twelve as 6Y4). If we subtract one, we get a three-digit string of nines (highest single digit): 1000 - 1 = 999 (written in base twelve as 6Y3).
A “round” four-digit number in base twelve is written as 1000 (written in base ten as 1728). If we subtract one, we get a three-digit string of Ys (highest single digit): 1000 - 1 = YYY (written in base ten as 1727).
I hope this shows you how there’s symmetry between the bases and there is nothing special about base 10 other than we’re familiar with it. If we were familiar with base 12, the “round” numbers for us would be (writing in base 10 here): 12, 144, 1728, … which we would be writing as 10, 100, 1000, …
That would be the case for any base system. Do you know what a base system is? It’s basically how many values before you go to the next place. So base 2, or binary, is 0 and 1. Counting goes 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, … Base 16 is generally 0-F. Counting goes 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, 1F, 20,…
how about we all agree that the best system is american units with metric prefixes. After all it is obvious that it takes an hours to drive 318 kilofeet
You will constantly be switching back and forth and many of times using both at the same time. As an engineer who designs things built around the world, the most frustrating thing isn’t when it is built in the US and it is (almost) all Imperial. It also isn’t when it is built in Europe and everything is all Metric.
No, by far the most frustrating thing is when it is built in Mexico and our local teams have better access to Imperial raw material, but the local workers measure everything in metric. Such a damn mess - you have steel that is 1/2" thick, for example, but since it is Mexico we dimension it out to 12.7 mm, so nothing is ever a nice round number. And most threads are metric, but you can’t get all components in metric, so on the same piece of equipment you could have an M10x1.25 bolt and a 3/8-16 bolt.
I’m British and it’s sooo fun using older things that use strange measurements don’t even make much sense even cook books use a mix of metric and imperial even to this day
It was the contractor (I believe it was Lockheed?) who used pounds though NASA’s documentation used metric units, cause they make actual scientific contributions.
NASA also agreed with the logic of “sure, we don’t know how it’ll perform at low temperature, but we don’t know that it won’t work!” that led to the Challenger explosion. They aren’t infallible and they can make extremely stupid mistakes too.
I’m an engineer, and the unit mixup you’ve linked isn’t a failure of different unit systems, it’s just shitty engineering. You should always label your units. There’s several domains where even a single unit system has ambiguity without labeling – pressure with bars, atmospheres, and kilopascals.
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