It seems like a weird point to bring up. How often do y’all convert your measurements? It’s not even a daily thing. If I’m measuring something, I either do it in inches, or feet, rarely yards. I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this. When I have needed to, it’s usually converting down (I.e. 1/3 of a foot), which imperial does handle better in more cases.
Like. I don’t care if we switch, I do mostly use metric personally, it just seems like a weird point to be the most common pro-metric argument when it’s also the one I’m least convinced by due to how metric is based off of base 10 numbering, which has so many problems with it.
I used it a few times with measurements around the house but sure, it’s not a daily occurrence.
What most annoys me about imperial are the recipes. Why the fuck do you not weigh your ingredients? Instead you have to put everything in these measuring cups, shake it or even press it in so it sits flat. How many carrots is 1 cup of diced carrots? With experience you will know but if it said grams, you could weigh the whole thing in the store and be done with it. It doesn’t need to be very precise with cooking but you get the idea.
But don’t get me started on baking recipes…
Cups were invented by the pioneers. It’s easier to carry a cup around than to carry scales and a whole bunch of weights around. There is little no reason to still use cups.
TIL.
Crafty buggers
It’s not my measurements I need to convert, it’s other people’s. Don’t forget, American content is pretty overrepresented on the internet, so I actually need to do conversions pretty regularly.
Beyond the day to day, a spacecraft has burned up in the Martian atmosphere and an aircraft has run out of fuel mid-flight because of unit conversions not being done. These happenings aren’t very common, but the repercussions can be pretty big when they do, and the fact that this is a completely self-inflicted problem just makes it worse. Also, the shipping industry spends a good amount of money on unit conversions.
As for the problems with base-10, certainly a system based on base-12 would in principle be better (mind you, imperial isn’t one either). The problem is our numerals are base-10 and so our intuitions around numbers are based on that. 12 can still be dealt with, but once you get to 144 or 1728, it gets a lot harder. I can certainly name more integer divisors of 100 and 1000 off the top of my head despite having fewer of them.
That wasn’t because of unit conversions, that was a major failure of systems management.
I say this as someone in IT where we have multiple no involved people verifying work we do. Mistakes happen, so you have external validations. I’m not even permitted to touch the systems for which I’m responsible - I have to document changes, with extensive lab testing that is vettwd by someone who’s never seen these systems.
NASA should be shamed for dropping the ball so badly.
Ams those are the only two cases you can come up with, compared to the trillions it would take to convert, and the billions of errors that would occur with trying to convert now.
Just look at a single machine shop, that’s using large from 1945 (because that’s all they need for accuracy). Should they upgrade their lathes to new ones with metric indicators? How much steel isn’t going to take, coal, aluminum, energy just to transport the lathe to that one shop.
Then all their tools. The world doesn’t have the manufacturing capability just to make measurement tools for all the industries that would need it.
And then you’d still have the conversion problem between one business and the next during the decade’s long transition. How many conversion mistakes do you think would happen then?
You people who scream about this all the time have never had to even look at what it would take. You act like it’s a simple problem.
Oh, absolutely. And all of those are better arguments than “It’s easy to go from meters to km! Just shift a few decimals!” despite the latter being the more common argument I see.
And yeah, imperial isn’t base 12 either. I do think base 12 numbers would be better, and I would have exactly 0 reservations about metric if we did, though it’s not like I’m exactly anti-metric now. I use it probably about as much as I use imperial day-to-day
Well, I do think that has value too. This example is going to be fairly specific to my situation, but as a programmer working on simulation software, it’s not uncommon for me to see or need to enter values in terms of meters that I think of as being in the realm of kilometers. Being able to reason more intuitively about these distances just by moving the decimal point around instead of having to multiply/divide them by 5280 or something is helpful. And the reason I have this intuition to begin with is because I use the same units in everyday life. This does require the system of units to be based on multiples of 10, however.
I think the best ‘conversion’ thing in metric is not the mm/cm/m/km type ones but the volumetric type ones: a cubic metre of water/ 1 tonne / 1000 litres
What’s the equivalent un US units? 1 cubic yard / 1684.8 pound / 807.8961039 qt / 25852.675325 oz ?
Even then I don’t find the weight particularly useful, because it only applies to liquids with the same density of water.
Also 1 gallon is 231 cubic inches. Idk why, but it is, and I’ve already looked into all of the weird imperial measurements previously xD
ok, so i have a liquid (honey) with density of about 1.4 g/ml that is 1.4 tonne for the m^3
You had the same density of ~11.5lb/gal what is the above calculation?
just look at all that maths https://measuringstuff.com/how-much-does-a-gallon-of-honey-weigh/
[edit, shit my spelling is bad this morning]
They’re just annoyed that we use a different system with no upside when the rest of the world all chose to establish a consistent measurement system.
Which is fair enough. But now I’m annoyed that they keep complaining about it.
tbh… being in Canada sucks ass because of it.
here’s a fun flowchart for Canadians and living with both
and don’t get me started on date formatting…
wtf is 1/4/2026. is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
So you usually take your water for cooking out of the pool? ;-)
Oof. A good while back, I worked in a US-based company with offices globally, and they upgraded to a global ERP system. At launch of the new system, documents (such as purchase orders) printed with dates in MM/DD/YYYY format. Thankfully, my suggestion to change that to DD Mmm YYYY (eg. 31 Jan 2026) was quickly implemented without any pushback, but it totally blows my mind that a company operating globally would default to such an ambiguous date format.
As always, the only correct date format is ISO 8601
WHOOOO ISO-8601 FAN CLUB!!!
[Cheers and goes running out the door]
Correct! And yet…
wtf is 2026/1/4? is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
Though to be fair the chances of ISO 8601 goes up when year comes first
I mean, if it’s normalized to ISO 8601, then you KNOW that’s January 4th even without dashes or slashes. (although preeeetty sure the standard would require zeros before the 1 and 4 in either case)
The fucking date problem I can get behind with you.
I always use year/month/day now, which pisses off everyone but computers sort it properly every time.
It seems to also be different between provinces. I was shopping in Ontario (from BC) and the fruit was in ounces, which threw me. And at least in BC schools cooking class uses metric not cups.
They keep complaining about it because we keep using the worse system for no reason. /shrug
It’s a better system for me, because I already know it.
Metric is very easy to learn, so I’m not sure I’d go around flaunting that reason…
It is easy to learn how to convert between metric units. But that’s not what people mean when they talk about “learning metric”. They mean having an intuitive sense for how much, say, 100 meters or 100 milliliters is. Again, the emphasis on how easy it is to remember the conversion between meters and kilometers is extraneous.
Yea, that’s the really easy part. It just takes exposure on a level that’s more than twice a month and it’s practically by osmosis.
The conversions are the hard part.
And that’s how I know you’re an American!
Same reason the metric people keep telling me to change. Because if I did, it would be better for them. Difference is, I don’t drone on and on about how superior my forms of measurement are
I mean, it does have the noted benefit of down-converting between units being cleaner. 1/3 of a foot is 4 inches. 1/3 of a meter is 333.333…mm
I mean, you kind of cherry-picked there. A third of an inch is…?
Its all cherry picking.
1 barleycorn.
This is mental illness
Do people struggle that much more to divide dollars compared to feet?
I mean I totally get that base 12 is pretty cool for calculator-less maths (though not as cool for base 60) but ultimately, we still have a base 10 numbering system.
So yea, base 10 units for base 10 numbers. Using the same all the way down makes it easier to learn how to handle the more complicated divisions in all cases, you don’t have to switch logic if you see what I mean.
Of course, to each their own. The best case for metric remains that it’s the system everyone else has agreed on.
Ooh what are the problems with base ten?
Dividing my thirds sucks.
Base 12 ftw
3 1/3.
You don’t have to use a decimal point…
Hey! There’s nothing wrong with a little 3,333333333333333333333…∞
In order:
- Dividing by 3
- Dividing by 4
- Dividing by 6
- Dividing by 7
- Dividing by 8
- Dividing by 9
It’s really, really bad at handling dividing by anything but 1, 2, 5, or 10. Dividing by 3 is very frequently useful imo
That’s fair, I am pretty jealous of that 12 inches in a foot conversion. That a juicy one.
But then again, we rarely divide 1 or 10 of something. A third of a meter. 0.33333 meters? Wtf is that? Nah, just use centimeters instead. A third of a hundred. 33 cm! There we go. That’s the length of the rulers we had in school. I can even measure that shit using just my eyes.
Need even more precision? 333 millimetres, fuck it’s getting hot in here 🥵
I gotta chill out
If we need precision it’s 333.333 mm xD
Dude, we round that shit. But don’t worry, I got more precision that you can even fathom. Let’s go, 3333 μm… 33333nm… to the moon
Yes I’m high
BOOOR-IIING!
I like to make fun of that argument in my use of metric. I’m 19dm tall. Salt Lake City is about 1Mm away. Often throws native users off kilter a bit.
Honestly it always has felt a little weird that they go from the rough equivalent to inches, right to the rough equivalent to yards. Like. Decimeters makes sense to me. Idk why it doesn’t get used
Well, specifically because the conversions are so trivial, decimeters aren’t inherently more useful than specifying tens of centimeters. And with measurements of smaller lengths, you usually do need centimeter precision, so 57cm is simpler than 5.7dm or 5dm 7cm.
Well, and sometimes you also need millimeters, so 57.5cm is still conceptually simpler (57½cm) than 5.75dm.
All these combined mean that centimeters end up being used much more often. And then decimeters fell out of use even where it would still be a fitting unit (8dm instead of 80cm), because our brains work in patterns and will retain those patterns better that are used/trained more often.
I know conceptually what decimeters are, but if you tell me something is 8dm long, it does take a splitsecond for me to mentally convert that into 80cm, which is where all my brain’s patterns have been trained on. I have an intuition what “80cm” looks like in the real world, whereas I don’t for “8dm”, not without mentally converting it to cm.
Because the ability to easily convert between meters and kilometers is the only intrinsic benefit that metric has over any other form of measurement.
Some say imperial has some other benefits, like being easy to do math in your head with… but I’m skeptical that this benefit is worth much either - if it even exists at all.
The real benefit to metric is that it is standard across the world. So what the “convert to metric crowd” really wants to say is “it is inconvenient for me to have to keep converting from your units to mine - change your units for my benefit!” But that would feel rather dickish, so they make up a story about how changing your units is really for your benefit.
see my post[s] above
How much does 1 cubic yard of honey weigh is it’s density is 11.5lb/gal. In metric it ia 1.4 tonne to the m^3 even if I only know the weight of 1 L of honey.
Fuck trying to do that i US or imperial units
the only intrinsic benefit that metric has
The other benefit is that physical formulas usually work out easily
For example
1 Pa = 1 N / m2
or
1 bar= 1 N / cm2while “pounds per square inch” is nothing but insane. I couldn’t stop laughing for three days when I heard that for the first time.
Honestly, metric does have some benefits over imperial, it’s just I so often hear the one place it really doesn’t. It being a standard is useful! Rockets have exploded because of the US’s stuff being imperial, because they didn’t convert it to metric before sending it off. I don’t remember the exact story, admittedly
That probe died because of a lack of oversight. If they didn’t have a proper system verifications in place for something that obvious and simple, wtf else is NASA cowboyin’ up, Shuttle Solid Rocket Seals? Oh, yea, they did that one already. Or pure oxygen crew cabin and a door that takes minutes to open with no emergency release? Oh, yea, did that already.
If I pulled a boner like not having multiple external validations of some math I need to do, my team would laugh me out of the room when shit broke. I’d probably get a nickname for such an amateur thing.
Yeah, that was definitely a multi-leveled failure
I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this.
100% this. Look, imperial may be silly, but some of the arguments for changing to metric are also very silly. Things are usually at a mile scale or a foot scale, and I don’t really need to go between the two.
And sure, converting between different units is convenient in metric, but how often do you have to do that? So you can easily tell me how many liters of water would be needed to fill a giant, square kilometer fish tank, but who needs to do that? What grade school math problem are you living in?
There is one conversion that I use every now and then: liter to kilo: A liter of water weighs about a kilo.
Helpful to compare groceries when some products use weight and others volume. For example, I can buy 1kg buckets of yoghurt. I then know that those buckets hold about 1 liter. Handy when re-using the buckets.
I do stuff like this all the time. Like if i bought a pool i wanted to estimates how much water it needes to estimate all the follow up costs, if i am cooking something i often switch between kg and g, if am measuring things i switch between cm, m and mm depending on what i am currently measuring all the time. E.g. i needed a new working plate in my kitchen, i wanted it precut to fit exactly in after moving some cabinets while still aligning the sink. The whole space was measured in meters, but the individual cuts were all measured in milimeters. I was able to do all of that in 5 minutes with one piece of paper for sketching and my head. (And it fitted down to the milimeter in the end).
Or e.g. in my last appartment we had an weird electrical water heater that didn’t work that well. I was able to easily estimate the extra cost it procured by estimating water volume, temperature difference and electrical price, most annoying par was converting from joule to calories because it is not base 10. (would have taken >3years so not worth it for me)
For evidence of the mile scale vs foot scale bit:
We have 2 measurements between that we don’t really use anymore. Chains, and furlongs most notably (8 furlongs to a mile, 10 chains to a furlong, 100 links to a chain, 4 inches to a link). The middle distance is just yards now. 50 yards, etc.
Trying to convert your way of thinking by “making it easy.”
Honestly, it’s like a language. You have to use it and feel it through immersion. Experience is how you get people to convert.
They’re just jealous we don’t have to use decimals on our thermostats
Really?! The comfort difference of 1°C sounds like a first world problem to me.
I just toss stuff in a calculator and use both when necessary.
I measure in grams for dry and ounces for wet ingredients when baking.
I’ll include Celsius and Fahrenheit in weather conversations.
Cm or inches depending on what suits the crafting project better. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I tend to use grams for everything in the kitchen, because ounces are usually too big for what I need. Admittedly that’s mostly “Making coffee,” but still the point stands xD
Imperial came about as a system of units by measuring “everyday” things, and it remains pretty good for that. When you step outside the everyday, then it absolutely sucks - science deals with a lot of things that are too small, and engineering deals with a lot of things that are too large.
When I used to work in the water industry, working out how much chlorine is required to dose a hundred million litres of water per day at 0.5 mg/l, and therefore when I’d have to place an order to refill our fifty tonne storage tank, is easy enough to do in my head. If we were working in imperial, I’d have converted it to metric first and then estimated it.
On the other hand, metric calculations for pressure suck. If I weight 160 lbs and my bike tires are at 80 psi, then I have about two square inches in contact with the ground. If my car weighs 2500 lbs and its tires are at 30 psi, then each tire has about 20 square inches in contact with the ground. If I wanted scientific accuracy, then sure, I’d do it in metric, but I’d check the end result in imperial.
There’s near enough five thousand feet in a mile - if you need more accuracy than what you can do in your head, do it in metric with a calculator.
As someone who draws a lot of the things I make, I enjoy using Imperial.
It offers more immediate options. When sizing things I can easily change the size by 1/32nds", 1/16ths", 1/8ths", 1/4ths" or 1/2". It’s more intuitive for me.
Yeah, for small things metric’s actually great. I tend to use it to make my coffee
This wall is 3 metres wide, how many 80 cm shelves can I put up on it?
This wall is 9 feet wide, how many 2’8" shelves can I hang on it?
I cam guarantee you’re likely to do the same thing I did, which is just “That’s really close to 1m shelves, so it’s 3 with gaps.”
I grew up with US customary units and I still took a long time to get that compared to metric instantly
I don’t know how many 's and "s go in a foot so ¯\(°_o)/¯
And no, I’d go 8 16 24 32, ah, too much, so 3.
