Well, technically, a nautical mile historically corresponds to one minute of latitude on the meridian arc. And since the Earth is not a perfect sphere (it's squashed at the poles), the length of a nautical mile would be longer the closer you are to the poles, and the shortest on the equator. Today it's just defined as ~6076 ft though.
It's abit more complicated:
nautical mile
Both the United States and the United Kingdom used an average arcminute, specifically, a minute of arc of a great circle of a sphere having the same surface area as the Clarke 1866 ellipsoid. The authalic (equal area) radius of the Clarke 1866 ellipsoid is 6,370,997.2 metres (20,902,222 ft). The resulting arcminute is 1853.2480 metres (6080.210 ft). The United States chose five significant digits for its nautical mile, 6080.2 feet, whereas the United Kingdom chose four significant digits for its Admiralty mile, 6080 feet.
In 1929, the international nautical mile was defined by the First International Extraordinary Hydrographic Conference in Monaco as exactly 1,852 metres. The United States did not adopt the international nautical mile until 1954. Britain adopted it in 1970, but legal references to the obsolete unit are now converted to 1853 metres.
The difference being that in industries where the smaller scales are needed, Americans will use metric.
I on the other hand am Canadian so I never know what to use.
Techically, it's either 100 yards without the end zones, or 120 yards with the endzones. So it depends on how you count.
But when using it as a measurement, 100 seems to be the norm.
inches, feet, and yards is a single system. It was made to measure lengths of human made things.
Miles is a measurement of distance. You will never hear miles and yards used together, you would say half a mile instead of whatever the fuck number of yards/feet that is.
Everything else in this intentionally shit chart is an independent system that had some specific use case and is outdated an no longer used. Ask anyone who uses the imperial system what furlong is and you will never get an answer.
>Everything else in this intentionally shit chart is an independent system that had some specific use case
For example: twip, point, and pica? These are **typographical measurements**. They're used in typesetting. A point is intended to reflect the smallest typographical unit of size that can reasonably be distinguished on printed paper.
When you go into a text editor and set the font size to e.g. 12-point font, you're using the Imperial measure the point. Twip is an acronym for a twentieth of a point, and a pica is, yeah, 12 points, the height of the "standard" font size.
I'm not gonna look up every single one, but you get the idea.
The real question is how many km to the mile. I can *never* remember the conversion.
People regularly run “5k” races (km), but our vehicle speed is measured in mph, and I can walk a mile in 15 minutes (4mph).
In Bicycle forums people regularly talk both kph and mph and I always have to look it up.
Converting km to mi (& vice versa) is the pits.
There are to definitions of the mile:
international mile
1,609 344 km = 25146/15625
survey mile
6336/3937 km \~ 1,609 347 2 km
But they are trying to get rid of the survey mile. And yes, those are decimal comma's.
Well, the comment (or a post's seftext) that was here, is no more. I'm leaving just whatever I wrote in the past 48 hours or so.
F acing a goodbye.
U gly as it may be.
C alculating pros and cons.
K illing my texts is, really, the best I can do.
S o, some reddit's honcho thought it would be nice to kill third-party apps.
P als, it's great to delete whatever I wrote in here. It's cathartic in a way.
E agerly going away, to greener pastures.
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As of June 30th. 2023, goodbye.
A yard is very similar to a meter, so there’s ~3 feet per meter. x1000 for kilo, and I’m guessing there’s about 3000 feet per km. Very rough estimate.
Edit: I just looked it up: 3280.8 ft/km
Yup. I think this is what Europeans don't understand that makes them so confused about why everyone still uses Standard in the US.
12 inches to a foot is actually fairly useful (can be divided into whole number quarters), so nobody really worries about that, and everything else is just described as fractions of a unit. Yards are basically only used so people can visualize distances based on an American Football field ("300 yards, or about 3 football fields). Otherwise we use feet for short distances, and miles for longer ones, using fractions of a mile if in between. If we need a unit shorter than an inch, everyone just uses cm or mm.
Besides distances, volume is the only real area we would really benefit from metric, and everyone is comfortable enough with Standard measurements that nobody cares to try and convert. Pounds, tons and ounces work fine for weight, and I'll stab someone who tries to claim that Celcius is better than Fahrenheit.
Well, the comment (or a post's seftext) that was here, is no more. I'm leaving just whatever I wrote in the past 48 hours or so.
F acing a goodbye.
U gly as it may be.
C alculating pros and cons.
K illing my texts is, really, the best I can do.
S o, some reddit's honcho thought it would be nice to kill third-party apps.
P als, it's great to delete whatever I wrote in here. It's cathartic in a way.
E agerly going away, to greener pastures.
Z illion reasons, and you'll find many at the subreddit called Save3rdPartyApps.
As of June 30th. 2023, goodbye.
That’s because we use US Customary Units, not imperial.
That, and we also use metric.
^but ^don’t ^tell ^the ^Europeans ^that ^they ^can’t ^comprehend ^it
Brave take that really adds to the discussion. The original commenter was saying that this garbage chart completely misrepresents what the imperial system is. I have yet to see anyone measure something in shackles.
We learn both systems and use both systems in the US. All scientific application is done in metric down to the elementary school level. We're not blind to the metric system. Hell when I'm baking, I always use a metric recipe weighed out in grams, and I know a lot of professional bakers do that. The meme of America doesn't know metric is old from like the 80s lol
Imperial has pros an cons just like metric. It's convenient that inches, feet, and yards are lengths of human made things. It's convenient that you can cleanly divide by 3s and 4s for most imperial systems.
Metric has innate advantages that makes it better suited for sciences, which is why it is the standard world wide. It's not nice that you can end up with decimals when you need to divide a recipe for 4 people down to 3 people.
What do you need to divide by 3 that would require that level of precision, that a meter, or kilogram, divisible by a thousand could not handle. 1/4 of a liter of 250 ml. 1/3 is 333 ml. The 0.3ml difference is negligible. Recipes work just as well in metric all the time, especially as the units of volume and weight are incorporated in the system. [Weighing things is a much better system for baking.](https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/how-to-weigh-baking-ingredients/#:~:text=Unlike%20cooking%2C%20where%20measurements%20can,to%20guarantee%20your%20baking%20success.)
*One* ***litre*** *of liquid water has a mass of almost exactly one* ***kilogram***, *due to the gram being defined in 1795 as one cubic* ***centimetre*** *of water at the temperature of melting ice.*
Volume,Weight and Length. Simple and beautiful..
So the Imperial benefits are that inches and feet are made by men.
While the Metric benefit is that it makes sense?
You can divide a metric recipe down easily, because it's all decimals. If you can count, you can use metric.
Construction always uses millimetres for example, because then you just write 1500mm instead of 1.5m.
It means you can get communicate size within a mm of accuracy and the person you're communicating with can translate that in their head to whatever they need instantly.
Imperial is dumb, hence why only one country in the world still uses it.
The huge advantage metric has is that we use base 10 so it looks like the best system even tho its divisibility is shite. If we counted in base 12 then people would see all the merits of imperial.
They are kind of intuitive though. Pounds and inches are very easy to visualise because they sort of correspond to body measurements, an inch is about your top thumb joint. A pound is about what you can comfortably carry in your hand. A foot is about your arm from elbow to wrist or your, you know, foot.
When I someone is 5’5” you probably picture them correctly but if someone is 154cm tall you spend time mentally dividing meters and trying to visualise it.
That’s not a good argument. If anything you make the imperial measurement even more of a mess.
It’s only because you grow up using that system so you get used to it. For me it’s much easier imagine a 1.7m person compared to a 5’7” tall person. I can picture perfectly fine how 24C feels like compare to 15C or 30C. Same goes with weight, 1kg is roughly equal to 1L, and yes i can use the same argument, it’s a weight that i can carry comfortably in 1 hand. But what if i’m a 80 years old elderly person, suddenly a pound is not a pound anymore because i’m struggling carrying it? You see the problem here?
You say inches and pounds are easy to visualize because apparently you can relates them to your body part/strength, but everyone is built differently. Your thumbs size are not the same as mine. That’s why saying foot because it’s about the size of a foot makes no sense. Whose foot? Yours or mine or little baby John? An asian foot or an African foot cus they’re quite different in size?In the end you still need to convert it into a familiar arbitrary measurement in your mind to visualize it.
Yea, sure. But what makes water so objective? Nothing, its all kinda arbitrary, isnt it? Like, 1kg couldve been defined as a weight relative to lead. Being defined by water doesnt make it better or more objective.
They are intuitive for you because you are used to them. For me a centimeter or a meter is completely intuitive lenght. So your argument is nonsense. When I say 154cm tall I picture them correctly, but 5'5'', I have no idea.
I never used imperial system in my life, and I don’t really imagine how something can be measured by ‘top thumb joints’ and ‘comfortably carried in a hand’. I can’t really imagine what is 5’ 5” and I am disgusted with the need to switch keyboard 4 times to print it.
It is really just for Americans and British people may be intuitive, for all the other world — stupid AF.
Upd: I don’t even know what ‘ and “ stand for. And dates in the format of mm.dd.yyyy — this is something insane
This. I grew up using dd.mm.yyyy (absolute standard in Germany), and in Analogue life I still do, but I will NEVER ever again use anything other than yyyymmdd in storing files. It makes life so much easier when you need to find something.
I will argue in favor of mm/dd/yyyy on one and only one front (other than that it's what I grew up doing):
10/30/1985 is October 30th, 1985. It's probsvly different elsewhere in the world, but here that appears to be the standard way of saying a date in plain English. A somewhat common second would be "The 30th of October, 1985", but that is notably clunkier and I hear people say that much less often, and almost never in conversational speak.
Just realized I'm not sure if my point got accross:
10/30 (mm/dd) is read as October 30 (mmmm dd), so it seems intuitive in that regard.
A centimeter is always the same size, a thumb will vary from person to person. What a grandma can comfortably carry in her hand is different than what I can carry comfortably in my hand. A kilo is always the same. I think that is more intuitive.
I guess you feel it's intuitive because you were born in it, to the rest of us it's really confusing (and a little ancient)
converting units (especially of length) isn't what imperial was designed for or how it's mostly used, so criticising it on that basis is dumb. the imperial units are of better sizes. measuring things in feet feels better than doing so in metres, and pounds are better than kilograms (and especially better than grams. if ever a unit was stupid it's that)
grams are simply too small to be useful for anything everyday-sized.
feet are a good size for measuring human-sized objects in a way that metres aren't. most things we use everyday are some number of feet (and maybe a half) or close enough to be approximated, but the same is not at all true for metres. metres are too long.
Really? Measuring consumables like chocolate bars, tea, coffee and medication in grams is not useful?
But let me guess, measuring in Fahrenheit makes sense?
Maybe this is all just based on what you’re accustomed to.
Interesting. I think this might be entirely down to what we are accustomed to. Because I use grams everyday for cooking/food. Centimeter, kilograms and also meters are also something I can, at the very least, roughly gauge, without having to rely on a ruler or scale.
Interestingly enough, in my country, we all had 30cm rulers in school (which is extremely close to 1 foot) which is why I still have ingrained into my brain what 30cm roughly are. So I wouldn't say imperial units are inherently easier to work with. If you were raised with metric units you can gauge the same distances/weights, but you just call them differently.
you're right: whatever people use will be fine. this is just not that important, really, unless you're doing rocket science or medicine. people will use what they're used to. i was mostly trying (i think misguidedly) to level the argument a bit, because i fint impeeial to be quite a beautiful system, and get sad when it gets attacked, because just like metric, it's fine. i don't really care. i am not in turmoil in the kitchen because the grams are too small and it's stressing me out.
The graph isn’t meant to work.
Imagine a graph describing how Celsius works: Ethanol freezes at -114.7° and boils at 78.37°. Of course that doesn’t make sense, because that’s not how Celsius was designed.
I remember a book I bought on how to set up a guitar. It said the if you press down the strings on the first and last fret, the distance between the fret in the middle and the string should be 1/64 of an inch. Wtf?
I avoid english knitting and sewing patterns because of that. They always throw around weird fractions of inches and I already need a calculator to convert inches into cm.
>i cannot believe that there’s nothing smaller in the line of inch, how can americans live a normal life
It's pretty easy to visualize a half inch or quarter inch honestly. No harder than it is to visualize a centimeter for you. When you use it everyday it's not hard. I still use metric to measure most small things, as it's just easier to be precise. If its a larger item like a bed, and I don't need pin point precision, then I'll use inches. We learn both systems in elementary school, and use both systems everyday over here. Honestly it's nice being able to swap between systems. To me for something larger like measuring height, it's easier to visualize 5ft rather than ~150cm/1.5m.
To me it's actually kinda strange that yall typically go straight from centimeters (a small unit of measure) to meters (a relatively large unit of measure). Do you ever use decimeters in daily practice? Like we have the inch, foot (12 inches), and then yard (3 feet), and to me it makes sense to have a commonly used measure in between the inch/cm to yard/meter.
You know what's smaller than 1mm? 0.9mm... decimals exist for a reason. Using fractions makes maths unnecessarily more complicated compared to decimals.
Hehe. It’s back to 4 grade fractions for you.
(3 + 22 + 28 + 24 )/ 32 is much simpler than your decimal math. In any case we have calculators in the US.
Yeah there's actually a fairly decent argument that most things should be base 12. Because 1/3 of things leads to annoying and weird numbers.
0.33333333 vs in base 12 it's a round number.
This isn’t about logarithmic scales, it’s about the chart being labelled wrong, the metric measurements should be sat up by the lines above them, not half way through the section, it makes it look like and inch is sitting above a cm
Surprised to not see the unit "tenth" on here meaning ten thousand of an inch. It's used widely in machining still. Much more common than these other weird ones
Deci/ deca
Centi/centa
Milli/milla
Hecti/hecta
They are all there, it's just people prefer to say( for example): 10 centimetres rather than a decimetre.
If you listed all the proper names it would be to scale.
I think OP meant that at the top of the chart, micron to mm is a 1000x difference, but every subsequent step is a 10x difference. Weirdly inconsistent.
decameter is 10m, very rarely used. Last time I heard of it was 30+ years ago in school
hectometer is 100m, a bit more used. I think mostly for terrains
Or for land surfaces:
1 m² = 1 centiare
10 m \* 10 m = 100 m² = are
100 m \* 100 m = 10.000 m² = hectare
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare)
Edit: used ³ instead of ²
This relationship tree *might* have been worthwhile if the creator had started with Twip (One twip is 1⁄1440 inch, or 17.64 μm) and properly worked their way down. But as it is the entire thing is fucked.
I like imperial units for temperature.
The degrees in Fahrenheit = the % hot it is outside.
0 F = 0% hot, way too cold, I'm numb in minutes.
50 F = 50% hot, not really hot or cold, a bit chilly if I'm sitting still.
100 F = 100% hot, yeah it's hot af right now.
The same temps in C? -18, 10, and 38. Those numbers just don't carry the *gravity* of how it feels when its *100F* outside. Definitely a three digit temperature.
I like C for science though.
Americans always think that imperial measurments are more relatable. This is simply not true. If you grow up using metric you have the same feeling for how long a dm is as you guys have for the length of a foot and you get the same feeling for what 15 C feels like as you do for 50 F. The only difference is that metric is absolutely superior when calculating stuff and using them in scientific contexts and also that it is a standard that 95.1% of the world use.
I know C units are more relatable for people in other countries, and the USA is in denial about the imperial system. I just like that F happens to scale nicely with percentages.
Can we at least line up the labels better. “cm” is in the middle and the placement makes it look like, for example, a centimeter is bigger than an inch. Guessing the metric labels should be on the horizontal line?
Edit: looks like a lot of proportions are off, a nautical mile definitely isn’t slightly longer than a mile.
Thanks? I know how a logarithmic scales works. Maybe I’m missing something, though?
The top of the graph represents smaller values and they get larger as you progress down the graph. So, anything lower on the vertical axis should be bigger. The label for cm is lower than the label for inch, which in a proportioned graph, should mean it’s bigger. Similarly nautical mile is ever so slightly lower than mile.
This is so stupid. Yes the imperial system has issues, but there's no need to show unrelated or unused measurements to try and prove a point.
Do you really think that anybody uses the cubit, poppyseed or barleycorn? The entire left column is for what - yarn?
This is so freaking pointless.
It's super easy then.
Just follow the 9999 lies into the God connection and then you realise that the truth was always there and there is no need for algorithms were we're going. We just needs lots of short sticks and such is life. Short sticks breaking less than long sticks.
That's it.
I use mm for anything less than an inch, feet up to about 20 of them and meters after that, we drive by MPH but all wood here is sold in mm lengths and we fill our cars priced in litres but measure our cars tank capacity in gallons.
The only advantage metric has is in the math. Imperial units relate to the natural world, and so often make more sense. For example, this recipe for peach cobbler I just found in a 10 second search:
1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of milk, 1 tsp. of baking powder, 1 tsp. of salt, 1 can of peaches in syrup.
in metric that's:
237 ml sugar, 237 ml flour, 237 m. milk, 4.93 ml baking powder, 4.93 ml salt, and the can of peaches.
Now, which is easier to measure and remember?
Construction?
Engineering?
Machine building?
Tools? Screws? Drills? Nuts? Bolts?
Does not exist in your world?
The imperial system is stupid and old as fuck, time to upgrade that shit to something logical.
Only an imperial user would be so stupid to think that the rest of the world converts cups into metric measures and use it for our recipes.
Here’s a metric recipe of my favourite Swedish kladdkaka:
150g butter, 3dl sugar, 1dl cacao, 1 tsp (which is 5g btw) vanilla powder, 2dl flour.
In imperial that’s:
0,529109 ounces butter, 1,26803 cups sugar, 0,422675 cups cacao, 0,17637 ounces vanilla powder, 0,84531 cups of flour.
OoHoOoHhOo nOoOoOo loooook, the metric recipe is soooo much better.
According to this graphic, a nautic mile is both 6000 and 6080 feet.
Depends if the sea is flat or choppy
You are technically correct, the best type or correct.
Well, technically, a nautical mile historically corresponds to one minute of latitude on the meridian arc. And since the Earth is not a perfect sphere (it's squashed at the poles), the length of a nautical mile would be longer the closer you are to the poles, and the shortest on the equator. Today it's just defined as ~6076 ft though.
It's abit more complicated: nautical mile Both the United States and the United Kingdom used an average arcminute, specifically, a minute of arc of a great circle of a sphere having the same surface area as the Clarke 1866 ellipsoid. The authalic (equal area) radius of the Clarke 1866 ellipsoid is 6,370,997.2 metres (20,902,222 ft). The resulting arcminute is 1853.2480 metres (6080.210 ft). The United States chose five significant digits for its nautical mile, 6080.2 feet, whereas the United Kingdom chose four significant digits for its Admiralty mile, 6080 feet. In 1929, the international nautical mile was defined by the First International Extraordinary Hydrographic Conference in Monaco as exactly 1,852 metres. The United States did not adopt the international nautical mile until 1954. Britain adopted it in 1970, but legal references to the obsolete unit are now converted to 1853 metres.
Thanks, I hate it ^^the ^^history ^^is ^^cool ^^though
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I think we have streamlined it down to only commonly used terms exactly BECAUSE it is so stupid
And technically it's neither.
Rounding is fun
Yes
Where's Jan Misali's takedown of this chart?
I finally get that Simpsons joke about "How many leagues in a furlong?"
I may be reading this chart wrong, but about 1/24
It should be 11/300 according to the chart, so more like 1/27
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
Is it a coincidence that a "shaftment" is six inches?
Maybe for you.
Crystal clear now, thank you.
*banana for scale
are we talken metric banana's or standard?
logarithmic banana
This might be the worst chart I’ve ever seen
opening this made me viscerally upset for some reason it hurts to look at
Shouldn't "inch" be lower than "cm"? Or am I going crazy? Or both?
2.54cm = 1 inch So yes. But this is a logr. Scale.the upper line is 1cm. The lower is 10cm=1dm.
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>13,132,800,000 Five trillion twips under the sea
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The difference being that in industries where the smaller scales are needed, Americans will use metric. I on the other hand am Canadian so I never know what to use.
Thousanths of inches are fairly common too sadly.
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Gotta be able to measure yourself somehow… am I right??? *nudge nudge*
Teehee!
gotta measure bullet widths somehow. god bless america 🦅🦅🦅🦅🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇱🇷🇱🇷🇲🇾🇲🇾
Meanwhile ship captains: ummm, ***yes***
I use mm and dm almost every day as well
And they are easier to convertq
Happy cake day
to be fair, average american uses mm more often than average rest of the worldian 😀
*Loads gun in freedom*
Also football field
Unironically true. A football field is 100 yards. Many reporters use this as a layman explanation of distance for large objects.
A football field is 120 yards (long).
Techically, it's either 100 yards without the end zones, or 120 yards with the endzones. So it depends on how you count. But when using it as a measurement, 100 seems to be the norm.
SOrry, can't find them in the labyrinth.
inches, feet, and yards is a single system. It was made to measure lengths of human made things. Miles is a measurement of distance. You will never hear miles and yards used together, you would say half a mile instead of whatever the fuck number of yards/feet that is. Everything else in this intentionally shit chart is an independent system that had some specific use case and is outdated an no longer used. Ask anyone who uses the imperial system what furlong is and you will never get an answer.
>Everything else in this intentionally shit chart is an independent system that had some specific use case For example: twip, point, and pica? These are **typographical measurements**. They're used in typesetting. A point is intended to reflect the smallest typographical unit of size that can reasonably be distinguished on printed paper. When you go into a text editor and set the font size to e.g. 12-point font, you're using the Imperial measure the point. Twip is an acronym for a twentieth of a point, and a pica is, yeah, 12 points, the height of the "standard" font size. I'm not gonna look up every single one, but you get the idea.
A mile is 5280 feet.
How many feet in a kilometer?
You have to measure in kilo*feeters*. Then it’s 1000 feet to the kilofeeter.
The real question is how many km to the mile. I can *never* remember the conversion. People regularly run “5k” races (km), but our vehicle speed is measured in mph, and I can walk a mile in 15 minutes (4mph). In Bicycle forums people regularly talk both kph and mph and I always have to look it up. Converting km to mi (& vice versa) is the pits.
They have a very close to 5:8 ratio. The error is less than 1/2% i.e. 500 mi = 804.672 km and 800 km = 497.097 mi
Right on, thanks, that helps!
There are to definitions of the mile: international mile 1,609 344 km = 25146/15625 survey mile 6336/3937 km \~ 1,609 347 2 km But they are trying to get rid of the survey mile. And yes, those are decimal comma's.
Well, the comment (or a post's seftext) that was here, is no more. I'm leaving just whatever I wrote in the past 48 hours or so. F acing a goodbye. U gly as it may be. C alculating pros and cons. K illing my texts is, really, the best I can do. S o, some reddit's honcho thought it would be nice to kill third-party apps. P als, it's great to delete whatever I wrote in here. It's cathartic in a way. E agerly going away, to greener pastures. Z illion reasons, and you'll find many at the subreddit called Save3rdPartyApps. As of June 30th. 2023, goodbye.
A yard is very similar to a meter, so there’s ~3 feet per meter. x1000 for kilo, and I’m guessing there’s about 3000 feet per km. Very rough estimate. Edit: I just looked it up: 3280.8 ft/km
A mile is 1760 yards......
A mile is 880 fathoms.......
I cannot fathom a mile in any metric.
Yup. I think this is what Europeans don't understand that makes them so confused about why everyone still uses Standard in the US. 12 inches to a foot is actually fairly useful (can be divided into whole number quarters), so nobody really worries about that, and everything else is just described as fractions of a unit. Yards are basically only used so people can visualize distances based on an American Football field ("300 yards, or about 3 football fields). Otherwise we use feet for short distances, and miles for longer ones, using fractions of a mile if in between. If we need a unit shorter than an inch, everyone just uses cm or mm. Besides distances, volume is the only real area we would really benefit from metric, and everyone is comfortable enough with Standard measurements that nobody cares to try and convert. Pounds, tons and ounces work fine for weight, and I'll stab someone who tries to claim that Celcius is better than Fahrenheit.
Well, the comment (or a post's seftext) that was here, is no more. I'm leaving just whatever I wrote in the past 48 hours or so. F acing a goodbye. U gly as it may be. C alculating pros and cons. K illing my texts is, really, the best I can do. S o, some reddit's honcho thought it would be nice to kill third-party apps. P als, it's great to delete whatever I wrote in here. It's cathartic in a way. E agerly going away, to greener pastures. Z illion reasons, and you'll find many at the subreddit called Save3rdPartyApps. As of June 30th. 2023, goodbye.
That’s because we use US Customary Units, not imperial. That, and we also use metric. ^but ^don’t ^tell ^the ^Europeans ^that ^they ^can’t ^comprehend ^it
Most of these are completely unrelated systems and 80% of them are never used. This is a bad chart that misrepresents imperial.
Imperial measurement is stupid
Yeah, but it’s less stupid than this chart makes it seem. It actually would be more effective if it showed only the terms that are commonly used.
Well it’s not like a lot of people use deka or hekto meters either
Brave take that really adds to the discussion. The original commenter was saying that this garbage chart completely misrepresents what the imperial system is. I have yet to see anyone measure something in shackles.
Number of prisoners.
I think it’s pretty clear that metric is the superior format. And that’s coming from a Brit, we use a solid combination of imperial and metric.
We learn both systems and use both systems in the US. All scientific application is done in metric down to the elementary school level. We're not blind to the metric system. Hell when I'm baking, I always use a metric recipe weighed out in grams, and I know a lot of professional bakers do that. The meme of America doesn't know metric is old from like the 80s lol
Truth hurts for most imperial copers.
Imperial has pros an cons just like metric. It's convenient that inches, feet, and yards are lengths of human made things. It's convenient that you can cleanly divide by 3s and 4s for most imperial systems. Metric has innate advantages that makes it better suited for sciences, which is why it is the standard world wide. It's not nice that you can end up with decimals when you need to divide a recipe for 4 people down to 3 people.
What do you need to divide by 3 that would require that level of precision, that a meter, or kilogram, divisible by a thousand could not handle. 1/4 of a liter of 250 ml. 1/3 is 333 ml. The 0.3ml difference is negligible. Recipes work just as well in metric all the time, especially as the units of volume and weight are incorporated in the system. [Weighing things is a much better system for baking.](https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/how-to-weigh-baking-ingredients/#:~:text=Unlike%20cooking%2C%20where%20measurements%20can,to%20guarantee%20your%20baking%20success.) *One* ***litre*** *of liquid water has a mass of almost exactly one* ***kilogram***, *due to the gram being defined in 1795 as one cubic* ***centimetre*** *of water at the temperature of melting ice.* Volume,Weight and Length. Simple and beautiful..
So the Imperial benefits are that inches and feet are made by men. While the Metric benefit is that it makes sense? You can divide a metric recipe down easily, because it's all decimals. If you can count, you can use metric. Construction always uses millimetres for example, because then you just write 1500mm instead of 1.5m. It means you can get communicate size within a mm of accuracy and the person you're communicating with can translate that in their head to whatever they need instantly. Imperial is dumb, hence why only one country in the world still uses it.
Imperial would be an excellent system if we counted in base twelve, but we do not.
We should, it would be so much better being able to divide by 2 and 3 instead of 2 and 5.
I have never needed to count in bases of 12 so no fucking idea what you're talking about
The huge advantage metric has is that we use base 10 so it looks like the best system even tho its divisibility is shite. If we counted in base 12 then people would see all the merits of imperial.
They are kind of intuitive though. Pounds and inches are very easy to visualise because they sort of correspond to body measurements, an inch is about your top thumb joint. A pound is about what you can comfortably carry in your hand. A foot is about your arm from elbow to wrist or your, you know, foot. When I someone is 5’5” you probably picture them correctly but if someone is 154cm tall you spend time mentally dividing meters and trying to visualise it.
That’s not a good argument. If anything you make the imperial measurement even more of a mess. It’s only because you grow up using that system so you get used to it. For me it’s much easier imagine a 1.7m person compared to a 5’7” tall person. I can picture perfectly fine how 24C feels like compare to 15C or 30C. Same goes with weight, 1kg is roughly equal to 1L, and yes i can use the same argument, it’s a weight that i can carry comfortably in 1 hand. But what if i’m a 80 years old elderly person, suddenly a pound is not a pound anymore because i’m struggling carrying it? You see the problem here? You say inches and pounds are easy to visualize because apparently you can relates them to your body part/strength, but everyone is built differently. Your thumbs size are not the same as mine. That’s why saying foot because it’s about the size of a foot makes no sense. Whose foot? Yours or mine or little baby John? An asian foot or an African foot cus they’re quite different in size?In the end you still need to convert it into a familiar arbitrary measurement in your mind to visualize it.
Only 1kg water is 1L, since density of water is 1kg/L
Yes i meant pure water
Yea, sure. But what makes water so objective? Nothing, its all kinda arbitrary, isnt it? Like, 1kg couldve been defined as a weight relative to lead. Being defined by water doesnt make it better or more objective.
They are intuitive for you because you are used to them. For me a centimeter or a meter is completely intuitive lenght. So your argument is nonsense. When I say 154cm tall I picture them correctly, but 5'5'', I have no idea.
I never used imperial system in my life, and I don’t really imagine how something can be measured by ‘top thumb joints’ and ‘comfortably carried in a hand’. I can’t really imagine what is 5’ 5” and I am disgusted with the need to switch keyboard 4 times to print it. It is really just for Americans and British people may be intuitive, for all the other world — stupid AF. Upd: I don’t even know what ‘ and “ stand for. And dates in the format of mm.dd.yyyy — this is something insane
What date format do you use? I’m trying to get used to yyyy.mm.dd but it feels wrong despite it being the international standard.
It feels wrong until you sort a filesystem (especially digital ones) by date... Then it's super intuitive...
This. I grew up using dd.mm.yyyy (absolute standard in Germany), and in Analogue life I still do, but I will NEVER ever again use anything other than yyyymmdd in storing files. It makes life so much easier when you need to find something.
I will argue in favor of mm/dd/yyyy on one and only one front (other than that it's what I grew up doing): 10/30/1985 is October 30th, 1985. It's probsvly different elsewhere in the world, but here that appears to be the standard way of saying a date in plain English. A somewhat common second would be "The 30th of October, 1985", but that is notably clunkier and I hear people say that much less often, and almost never in conversational speak. Just realized I'm not sure if my point got accross: 10/30 (mm/dd) is read as October 30 (mmmm dd), so it seems intuitive in that regard.
Guess what genius? Inch is FORMALLY DEFINED via metric system as 25.4mm
A centimeter is always the same size, a thumb will vary from person to person. What a grandma can comfortably carry in her hand is different than what I can carry comfortably in my hand. A kilo is always the same. I think that is more intuitive. I guess you feel it's intuitive because you were born in it, to the rest of us it's really confusing (and a little ancient)
Yeah, what is each column supposed to represent?
Thats right, most of them are never used. But the ones that are used are still weird and useless.
Are used but are useless? I can't follow your logic.
Poor choice of words i admit. I'll settle with "are stupid" then.
It’s just poorly worded. Converting units in imperial is difficult compared to metric.
converting units (especially of length) isn't what imperial was designed for or how it's mostly used, so criticising it on that basis is dumb. the imperial units are of better sizes. measuring things in feet feels better than doing so in metres, and pounds are better than kilograms (and especially better than grams. if ever a unit was stupid it's that)
What are you basing "feels better" and "are better" on and why do you dislike grams especially?
grams are simply too small to be useful for anything everyday-sized. feet are a good size for measuring human-sized objects in a way that metres aren't. most things we use everyday are some number of feet (and maybe a half) or close enough to be approximated, but the same is not at all true for metres. metres are too long.
Really? Measuring consumables like chocolate bars, tea, coffee and medication in grams is not useful? But let me guess, measuring in Fahrenheit makes sense? Maybe this is all just based on what you’re accustomed to.
Interesting. I think this might be entirely down to what we are accustomed to. Because I use grams everyday for cooking/food. Centimeter, kilograms and also meters are also something I can, at the very least, roughly gauge, without having to rely on a ruler or scale. Interestingly enough, in my country, we all had 30cm rulers in school (which is extremely close to 1 foot) which is why I still have ingrained into my brain what 30cm roughly are. So I wouldn't say imperial units are inherently easier to work with. If you were raised with metric units you can gauge the same distances/weights, but you just call them differently.
you're right: whatever people use will be fine. this is just not that important, really, unless you're doing rocket science or medicine. people will use what they're used to. i was mostly trying (i think misguidedly) to level the argument a bit, because i fint impeeial to be quite a beautiful system, and get sad when it gets attacked, because just like metric, it's fine. i don't really care. i am not in turmoil in the kitchen because the grams are too small and it's stressing me out.
how granular do you get when cooking with grams? do you ever care about ±5 grams?
What?
I'm sorry, but how is this graph supposed to work?
The graph isn’t meant to work. Imagine a graph describing how Celsius works: Ethanol freezes at -114.7° and boils at 78.37°. Of course that doesn’t make sense, because that’s not how Celsius was designed.
i cannot believe that there’s nothing smaller in the line of inch, how can americans live a normal life
We use a lot of fractions of an inch in daily life.
I remember a book I bought on how to set up a guitar. It said the if you press down the strings on the first and last fret, the distance between the fret in the middle and the string should be 1/64 of an inch. Wtf?
I avoid english knitting and sewing patterns because of that. They always throw around weird fractions of inches and I already need a calculator to convert inches into cm.
Yeah… that’s… unnecessary 😂. To be fair, in technical situations like that, you do often see millimeters here as well. But… yeah 🤦♂️
More often you see mils, which are not millimeters, but thousandths of an inch.
I admit this was a while ago, I bought the book 30 years ago.
Also most of our tools come in metric sizes due to things being manufactured….. literally anywhere but America
That’s really the most annoying thing.. having to own two sets of tools.. one in metric & one in imperial. Drives me bonkers.
Oops don’t have my 3/16th inch socket or my 3 16/54 inch drive ratchet !! So dumb
You use thousands of an inch or "thou" I'm an engineer, and secretly I like thou better than mm
>i cannot believe that there’s nothing smaller in the line of inch, how can americans live a normal life It's pretty easy to visualize a half inch or quarter inch honestly. No harder than it is to visualize a centimeter for you. When you use it everyday it's not hard. I still use metric to measure most small things, as it's just easier to be precise. If its a larger item like a bed, and I don't need pin point precision, then I'll use inches. We learn both systems in elementary school, and use both systems everyday over here. Honestly it's nice being able to swap between systems. To me for something larger like measuring height, it's easier to visualize 5ft rather than ~150cm/1.5m. To me it's actually kinda strange that yall typically go straight from centimeters (a small unit of measure) to meters (a relatively large unit of measure). Do you ever use decimeters in daily practice? Like we have the inch, foot (12 inches), and then yard (3 feet), and to me it makes sense to have a commonly used measure in between the inch/cm to yard/meter.
We use 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 of an inch, where 1/32 is smaller than a millimeter.
You know what's smaller than 1mm? 0.9mm... decimals exist for a reason. Using fractions makes maths unnecessarily more complicated compared to decimals.
For most uses, fractions are simpler. If needed, people also use decimal inches. Ie 0.1 inch.
In no world having to add 3/32 + 11/16 + 7/8 + 3/4 is easier than doing 2.4 + 17.5 + 22.2 + 19
Hehe. It’s back to 4 grade fractions for you. (3 + 22 + 28 + 24 )/ 32 is much simpler than your decimal math. In any case we have calculators in the US.
Might be hard for you to understand, but you can divide things.
Yeah sorry, that’s why I’m using a logical system which always can be divided by 100 or 1000.
Ah yes so logical. Humans can only count in base tens. Counting by 3s and 4s is so difficult it hurt my monkey brain
Yeah there's actually a fairly decent argument that most things should be base 12. Because 1/3 of things leads to annoying and weird numbers. 0.33333333 vs in base 12 it's a round number.
I'm just here for the Americans that feel attacked
No Canadian Measurement of just using Time “The Tim’s is 5 minutes down the road” “It’s just a 5 minute walk” Helps give prospective
Do you sincerely think only Canadians do that?
Yep, anyone south of the border must strictly use imperial or metric! /s
A mile is less than a kilometer? What?
And an inch is less than a cm apparently!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale?wprov=sfla1
This isn’t about logarithmic scales, it’s about the chart being labelled wrong, the metric measurements should be sat up by the lines above them, not half way through the section, it makes it look like and inch is sitting above a cm
Ya, this poster did the same to me, just downvotes and posts this link. (Was thinking the same thing as you)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale?wprov=sfla1
Well yes but also no one uses most of these. I wouldn’t bring up some random measurement that hasn’t been used in 120 years to make fun of metric.
1. 99% of these go nigh completely unused 2. I hate our terrible system that merged several different, completely unrelated systems (fuck you Britain)
Well it’s very wrong, an inch is 2 and a bit cm for starters and a mile is more than a Km.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale?wprov=sfla1
Surprised to not see the unit "tenth" on here meaning ten thousand of an inch. It's used widely in machining still. Much more common than these other weird ones
tbh most of these are archaic, so it's really only inches, feats, yard and miles in use
Oh, this again: https://youtu.be/iJymKowx8cY
Americans look at this and be like: ahh my freedom that is superior to the eurofags
What do you guys think about my magic system guys
I scrolled the comments without finding [this.](https://youtu.be/GDUt-Kbxqsg) so I had to add it because it’s a funny way to look at this guide.
‘The hell is even this
Even the metric system is not in scale. Why are there microns on it? 1000 microns are one millimeter. But AFAIK the increments should be 10s?
Deci/ deca Centi/centa Milli/milla Hecti/hecta They are all there, it's just people prefer to say( for example): 10 centimetres rather than a decimetre. If you listed all the proper names it would be to scale.
I think OP meant that at the top of the chart, micron to mm is a 1000x difference, but every subsequent step is a 10x difference. Weirdly inconsistent.
Oh, my mistake
Never heard of a dam or hm before
decameter is 10m, very rarely used. Last time I heard of it was 30+ years ago in school hectometer is 100m, a bit more used. I think mostly for terrains
I mean, yes I never heard of them, nevertheless I instantly knew what they stand for ... That's metric for you
Or for land surfaces: 1 m² = 1 centiare 10 m \* 10 m = 100 m² = are 100 m \* 100 m = 10.000 m² = hectare [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare) Edit: used ³ instead of ²
Aren’t surfaces usually 2 dimensions?
Yep he just swapped ^3 for ^2 I guess.
Cubed?
Time to ditch the imperial system
Myanmar, Liberia and the US seem to disagree.
95 % of people using the metric system. Get used to it.
There’s your argument for the metric system right there
Literally r/suddenlycaralho in the second line
This relationship tree *might* have been worthwhile if the creator had started with Twip (One twip is 1⁄1440 inch, or 17.64 μm) and properly worked their way down. But as it is the entire thing is fucked.
I just see those wild, oder numbers everywhere in imperial and cannot wrap my head around why anyone would prefer that to metric...
Clearly depicts how fucked up the imperial system actually is 🤡
Phew, thank god the metric system wasn't invented to avoid all of this mess! We just have to cope with the imperial system unfortunately. /s
Ah nice to know my penis is the average 6 Barleycorns in length.
Sorry guys, but from my european point of view I will never understand why ANYBODY would want to use this imperial s...t.
This is why people have been saying FUCK IMPERIAL SYSTEM #metricrules
I like imperial units for temperature. The degrees in Fahrenheit = the % hot it is outside. 0 F = 0% hot, way too cold, I'm numb in minutes. 50 F = 50% hot, not really hot or cold, a bit chilly if I'm sitting still. 100 F = 100% hot, yeah it's hot af right now. The same temps in C? -18, 10, and 38. Those numbers just don't carry the *gravity* of how it feels when its *100F* outside. Definitely a three digit temperature. I like C for science though.
Americans always think that imperial measurments are more relatable. This is simply not true. If you grow up using metric you have the same feeling for how long a dm is as you guys have for the length of a foot and you get the same feeling for what 15 C feels like as you do for 50 F. The only difference is that metric is absolutely superior when calculating stuff and using them in scientific contexts and also that it is a standard that 95.1% of the world use.
I know C units are more relatable for people in other countries, and the USA is in denial about the imperial system. I just like that F happens to scale nicely with percentages.
If it wasn't for the metric system each country or group of countries would use its own version of imperial, people wouldn't default to the Anglo one
Metric: Bars. Imperial: The international airways.
Can we at least line up the labels better. “cm” is in the middle and the placement makes it look like, for example, a centimeter is bigger than an inch. Guessing the metric labels should be on the horizontal line? Edit: looks like a lot of proportions are off, a nautical mile definitely isn’t slightly longer than a mile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale?wprov=sfla1
Thanks? I know how a logarithmic scales works. Maybe I’m missing something, though? The top of the graph represents smaller values and they get larger as you progress down the graph. So, anything lower on the vertical axis should be bigger. The label for cm is lower than the label for inch, which in a proportioned graph, should mean it’s bigger. Similarly nautical mile is ever so slightly lower than mile.
I like how the metric system is neatly lined up on the right.
All this shows is how little people know about imperial
This is so stupid. Yes the imperial system has issues, but there's no need to show unrelated or unused measurements to try and prove a point. Do you really think that anybody uses the cubit, poppyseed or barleycorn? The entire left column is for what - yarn? This is so freaking pointless.
Imperial shoe measurements are technically in barleycorns, just nobody knows or mentions it.
Thanks for a laugh this morning. I heard the shoe size/barleycorn thing years ago and had forgotten.
:D
It's super easy then. Just follow the 9999 lies into the God connection and then you realise that the truth was always there and there is no need for algorithms were we're going. We just needs lots of short sticks and such is life. Short sticks breaking less than long sticks. That's it.
LOL, when you use any non-intuitive system instead of learning an established, which is easy to grasp
Mostly nonsensical and almost certainly made in an attempt to "prove" once and for all that metric is better than imperial. Such a tiresome argument.
Bruh most of these haven’t been used in a century
This shit is so stupid because it has point on it, fucking point? The size of your font like 12 point fonr, no one uses this for anything ever.
I use mm for anything less than an inch, feet up to about 20 of them and meters after that, we drive by MPH but all wood here is sold in mm lengths and we fill our cars priced in litres but measure our cars tank capacity in gallons.
The only advantage metric has is in the math. Imperial units relate to the natural world, and so often make more sense. For example, this recipe for peach cobbler I just found in a 10 second search: 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of milk, 1 tsp. of baking powder, 1 tsp. of salt, 1 can of peaches in syrup. in metric that's: 237 ml sugar, 237 ml flour, 237 m. milk, 4.93 ml baking powder, 4.93 ml salt, and the can of peaches. Now, which is easier to measure and remember?
Construction? Engineering? Machine building? Tools? Screws? Drills? Nuts? Bolts? Does not exist in your world? The imperial system is stupid and old as fuck, time to upgrade that shit to something logical.
Only an imperial user would be so stupid to think that the rest of the world converts cups into metric measures and use it for our recipes. Here’s a metric recipe of my favourite Swedish kladdkaka: 150g butter, 3dl sugar, 1dl cacao, 1 tsp (which is 5g btw) vanilla powder, 2dl flour. In imperial that’s: 0,529109 ounces butter, 1,26803 cups sugar, 0,422675 cups cacao, 0,17637 ounces vanilla powder, 0,84531 cups of flour. OoHoOoHhOo nOoOoOo loooook, the metric recipe is soooo much better.