Socialism is when you're a contrarian, and the more contrarian you are, the more socialist it is
Its not the unit itself, but how the unit relates to their larger and smaller counterparts that makes one system easier to work with than the other. Remembering 1000 meters to a kilometer and 1000 millimeters or 100 centimeters to a meter is easy. Remembering 12 inches to a foot and 5280 feet to a mile is harder. Having everything be multiplied/divided by 10/100/1000 also means units can be converted just by moving the decimal place, something you can do as mental math easily and quickly. Quick, without a calculator and without paper tell me how many feet are in two miles, now tell me how many meters are in two kilometers. Another problem with feet and inches is that there isnt anything smaller than them. Metric has millimeters, and if you need even smaller than that theres micrometers and nanometers, which follow the same 1/1000th progression that other metric units do. With inches, if you wanna talk small stuff you have to use fractions, and fractions are tedious and unintuitive to do math on.
Quick, without a calculator and without paper tell me how many feet are in two miles
Quick, without a calculator tell me, if you have a 1m plank and cut it into half, then cut one half into thirds, and tell me how long each piece is.
In metric that's (1m-.125)/2, which a calculator tells me is 499.9375. Chop that into thirds and a calculator tells me it's 166.5625
In imperial (40"-1/8")/2 is 19 and 15/16", chopping that into thirds, 19 and 15/16"-3/8"= 19 and 9/16", and divide by 3 and you get 6 and 25/48".
No messy decimals, no loss of precision.
Another problem with feet and inches is that there isnt anything smaller than them
Fractions, and if you need something smaller than 1/256, there's thou.
Youre still allowed to divide up a meter into fractions if it makes your math easier, my point with inches and fractions was that there is no way to describe something smaller than an inch with a simple integer number, there are no nano-inches, and if there were, they would probably be a new entirely arbitrary fraction of an inch.
Youre still allowed to divide up a meter into fractions if it makes your math easier, my point with inches and fractions was
I mean technically true, but I get the sense metric users aren't trained to use fractions. Do European carpenters use fractions, or fuck around with 7 significant figures?
but I get the sense metric users aren’t trained to use fractions
Europeans know how to do fractions and use them except we don’t need to apply it to measurements because our system isn’t bad lol
easier to understand in imperial units
Trust me yank, if you use metric your whole life it’s easier than imperial
i mean north american machinists use thousands of an inch or (0.001") which is in the same realm as a micrometer
1/2 = 0.5 1/3 = 0.333... just multiply them together. Pick as much or as little accuracy as you want, 5 x 33 / 10 gives you about how many cm you need. If you need a tighter tolerance, 5 x 333 / 10 is how many mm you need.
Silly Americans would have to learn how to multiply in their heads and how to turn fractions into decimals, but otherwise they could divide lengths in their heads just like everyone else on the planet.
A blade is usually 3.175 mm (1/8" in imperial), you can't subtract a multiple of that, then easily divide the result by 2 or 3 over and over without getting increasingly nasty decimals or losing precision.
Cutting a 100 cm board in half isn't 100/2, it's (100-.3175)/2
If you need to actually divide a board into sixths just do like every other carpenter and mark off lines and cut to the right of the line and not on it exactly. Your last board is short, but they always are whether you marked it off in inches or cm. Take a look at a job sites garbage bin when they're framing, there are tons of ends of boards that routinely get tossed because they couldnt get it exactly right OR they shim the shit out of the last board, lol. They definitely dont divide the board into sixths perfectly including the fact that the width of the blade is going to shave off about 330 mm or about an 1/8th inch
Yes, the fractions are exact, but when you need to measure something, you probably won’t have anything marked for 48ths or whatever arbitrary fraction. You still have to make an approximation to use the closest fraction available.
For the seven digit numbers you’re using, the loss of precision is less than one part in a million, which shouldn’t be an issue for cutting planks of wood.
Also, there’s nothing about the metric system that stops you from using fractions.
you probably won’t have anything marked for 48ths or whatever arbitrary fraction
except the fractions aren't just random, that's the nice thing about it being divisible by 12, almost all of the time you do have those markers, so yes, you do have 48ths
In this example we're talking about inches and an inch is not any more divisible by 12 than a centimeter. Generally you're not going to see 48 divisions crammed into an inch on a ruler. You can have a set of specialty yardsticks with divisions set up for dividing by 3, 5, 7 etc. but you could do that with a meter the same way.
Except I have several tape measures with 64ths, they aren't exactly uncommon and you can do 48ths with 64ths
The argument was that imperial was better because you could do an exact division and get 6 and 25/48".
25 48ths is 33.333 repeating 64ths. You still have to eyeball a third of a division, the same way you would have had to eyeball half a millimeter.
hotter take it's useful to have a measure of distance and metres are good
Ok sure but at least I know it's 100 cm in a m. 1000 m in a km.
Like who thought 12 in for a foot, 3 feet for a yard was a good idea. & like only nerds know how many feet are in a mile.
Well you see, a meter is the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second; and a second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at a temperature of 0 Kelvin; and a Kelvin is the hypothetical temperature at which ...
This is your brain on scientism.
scientism
precisely measuring distances and time is a normative or epistemological value now? :side-eye-2:
Chuds needed a word to slander the opposite of their obscurantism, so they made up scientism.
At risk of serious-posting in the bit-post again; I wouldn't say that. I think there's a legitimate critique to be made with the concept; Dogmatically applying 'Science' to each and every facet of human life without critically assessing 'Science' itself can be pretty bad. It's how you get industrialized agriculture: Science was applied to maximize an area's output in grain. People didn't really consider that widespread monocultures may have negative effects too, because Science told them that this was the most efficient and effective way to produce the most grain with the least amount of work etc. (or lumber or whatever) - It's good to realize that Science isn't this magical process that will always tell you the best course forward, it's maybe a way to answer a very specific question with some degree of certainty - but not a tool that tells you when your question is entirely the wrong one to begin with.
Viewing science as an unquestionable dogma is, in itself, deeply unscientific. That doesn't change that this kind of thing, this "i read the headline of an article about a study somewhere and that means i got science on my side" is a widespread attitude, and i can get behind a good-faith critique of that.
It's just that i usually see this being brought up in bad faith atm and think we should be vary of that.
Dogmatically applying ‘Science’ to each and every facet of human life without critically assessing ‘Science’ itself can be pretty bad
yes, like with measurement in metric, sure it takes into account the scientific accuracies but it's not really designed fantastically for human use
To be fair, the implamentation of science is engineering. Don't blame scientists (unless they lie).
you could make the same silly statements about miles, it doesnt change that metric units are easier to convert between and there are more metric units for smaller sizes.
I mean I don't even care about all that, just that it's easier to count is nice.
The only non-arbitrary length unit is the Planck length. The Planck length is the smallest possible unit of distance that makes any physical sense in our universe. It is derived from the universal gravitational constant, the speed of light, and Planck's constant. Physically it represents the shortest possible wavelength for a photon of light. Since the wavelength is inversely proportional to the energy of the photon, a smaller wavelength means a larger energy. The Planck length is the wavelength at which a single photon would have so much energy it would spontaneously collapse into a black hole. Thus nothing can exist at a smaller size.
Unfortunately Planck lengths are too small to be of much practical use in everyday life. But I have a solution! Let's just take some multiple of the Planck length, and use that instead! The multiple will still be arbitrary, but the foundation it is based upon would not be. I suggest multiplying it by 6.25*10^34. I shall call this new semi-natural unit the Meeter! It is about equivalent to 1.0 meters.
Multiply the Planck length by a different arbitrary number to get a foot
Any unit of measurement is going to be pretty arbitrary in and of itself. The advantage of metric distance is that the relationships between units of different magnitude are not arbitrary. The US really should switch to metric distance, volume, and mass
I will defend Fahrenheit (for non-scientific purposes) until my dying breath though.
0°-100°
Fahrenheit: Really Cold - Really Hot
Celsius: Cold - Dead
Kelvin: Dead - Dead
No temperature system could ever line up with everyone's perception of hot and cold, but Fahrenheit is about as close as you can get.
No but you see, instead of #logical numbers I have to memorize arbitrary numbers! Checkmate, world
Memorize? You have no idea how baked-into Fahrenheit-users' collective memory the number 32 is. There's nothing to memorize, that just *is* freezing.
Same for metric. You just know what -30, -20, -10, 10, 20, 30 is and there's nothing to memorize. You just know the temperature.
I learn in American community college a simple rule: 0 - Freezing (32F) 10 - Cold (50) 20 - Cool (68F) 30 - Hot (30F)
Keep in mind that heat being a number is largely cultural. If you and I grew up with a different system, that system would make more sense.
Imo the real advantage of Fahrenheit's extra precision is that the temperatues naturally found in inhabited parts of the Earth cover much more of the scale -- including both 0 and 100!
fahrenheit sucks I learned celsius and forgot fahrenheit because it sucked so much. The temperatures said on tv and in my neighborhood mean nothing to me anymore. Oh it was 80° today? nope you're wrong, it's the high 20s. I am the water and my molecules innately know when we hit freezing = 0 degrees outside. Subzero operations every winter, arctic commando shit, the international standard, you'll never see me coming while you're looking at your broken thermometer. :brace-cowboy:
Thank you for the glorious pasta, I will spam it at Celsius snobs who respond to my comments
fahrenheit sucks I learned celsius and forgot fahrenheit because it sucked so much. The temperatures said on tv and in my neighborhood mean nothing to me anymore. Oh it was 80° today? nope you're wrong, it's the high 20s. I am the water and my molecules innately know when we hit freezing = 0 degrees outside. Subzero operations every winter, arctic commando shit, the international standard, you'll never see me coming while you're looking at your broken thermometer. :brace-cowboy:
You put the Brace emoji there but when I read "arctic commando shit" I only heard Cuno's voice from Disco Elysium.
If only we had dozenal metric, with a smaller meter, basically a metric inch and metric foot, because those are actually useful and something you can picture much easier than meters. you get the benefits of standard measurements, y'know being able to actually count and divide, as well the equal magnitudes of metric
Also fahrenheit is better and i will agree with that, celsius is how water feels and I'm not fucking water, I need to know how hot I will be
Decimalization is a plague wrought upon our society by bourgeois liberals, while traditional units of measurement were refined over thousands of years by the proletariat through practical use to be applicable to the real world.
Consider money. You have a mutual aid program with one thousand dollars that it needs to give to three equally-needy people. How the fuck are you going to give each of them $333.33 repeating money? Absolute bullshit.
The old money system was far more rational. Two-hundred forty pennies to a dollar was a pretty common way to break it up. That breakup allowed each dollar to be split evenly among 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 40, 48, 60, 80, 120, and 240 of your fellow workers. Compare that to the modern, decimalized dollar, which can only be split evenly between 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, and 100 of your fellow proletarians.
It’s not just money that suffers from decimalization though, it’s damn-near everything. What the fuck is 30 centimeters? Oh, it’s about as long as a foot. Why not just use a foot? Do you know how long a foot is? It’s about as long as A FUCKING FOOT! HOW MUCH IS 235 MILLILITERS? IT’S ABOUT AS LARGE AS A CUP! ISN’T OUR SYSTEM IS SO MUCH MORE LOGICAL THAN THE OLD SYSTEM OF A CUP BEING ABOUT AS LARGE AS A CUP!
You might be thinking “oh you’re just a dumb provincial American, get used to the metric system and it isn’t so bad.” Motherfucker the beautiful thing about the old measurement system is that you never have to “get used” to fucking anything, because the measurements are based on practical shit. The only practical measurement in the whole fucking metric system is the liter, and that’s because they made it almost indistinguishable from a quart.
BuT hOw MaNy QuArTs ArE iN a GaLlOn? Listen here you common core chucklefuck. Saying that it’s easier to remember metric because it’s all in tens or hundreds or whatever is just pasting a bandaid over the problem, which is that our education system has had all practical skills systematically rooted out of it. I remember taking Home Ec when I was in middle school and I damn well learned what all of the common measurements were by applying them to real life shit. This metric bullshit is designed to be easier to memorize when you read about it in a textbook.
Who would design this disaster? The French took a break from their rampant Islamophobia and Antisemitism to create this bullshit. But it wasn’t the French people, who continued to use traditional units of measure until the new systems were forced upon them, it was the post-revolutionary Bourgeoisie, who had never cut wood or measured flour in their fucking lives, who said “hon hon, let us introduce a new measurement system, oi oi” and infected the world with this plague.
Metric is idealistic nonsense imposed by rich assholes that is increasingly being favored over the materialist, proletarian traditional measurements. The only reason it has any continuing cultural purchase at all is because PMC dipshits like to lord how much smarter they are over everyone. Look inside yourself and destroy any vestige of a hold the metric system has on you, just as through self reflection you should seek to destroy all other forms of liberalism.
it's not so you can use your foot to design a jet engine, it's so you know roughly what it is
their is a foot measurement, and it's roughly the size of a foot. Not exactly, but about that much. You always know about what a foot is, not exactly of course, you use a ruler for that, but you always have a way to estimate something
Honestly we should be using base 12 numbers because (2, 3, 4, 6) divide into 12 instead of just (2, 5) for base 10. We could even still count on our fingers -- each of our four non-thumb fingers has three segments separated by knuckles. Use your thumb to mark the numbers. Hell, we could do base 24 that way.
Of course, it would be nightmarishly impractical to implement this with how entrenched our current numbers are.
The french and their metrication BS is disgusting, they should've dozenalized things instead of decimating everything. BASE 12 4 LIFE
I have a tablespoon that I need to divide into three parts, and a gallon that I need to divide in two.
The imperial system: Easy! That's a teaspoon and two quarts. See, unlike the metric system, when you have a system that's based on how people actually use measurements in real situa...
Oh, wait, hang on. Actually the gallon needs to be in three parts and I need the tablespoon in half.
The imperial system: Lol, get fucked loser
They first set it up as 1 ten millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator. Later they kept the same length but started defining it off things that are more fundamental like the speed of light.
Makes more sense than picking some kings foot as the standard.
Having strong opinions about units of measurement and talking about them on the internet is the same as correcting people's spelling or grammar on the internet. It's bad
Actually wrong dozenal gang decimal is cringe and bad count your knuckles
correcting people’s spelling
as an english language instructor, i have such a hard time with this... not like im running around being like "nuh uh uh, that's the wrong 'their' ", but when people use technical terms wrong it frustrates me because those words can mean something very different and end up being confusing for those reading...
Yeah like when Joe Biden calls everyone he doesn't like "anarchists"
Thesis: metric system
Antithesis: corndog units
Synthesis: Base-12 metric system 🥵
Imagine not basing your entire system on a metal bar and a box of water.
They have more rigorous definitions today. I think the distance light travels in x seconds or something
Couldn't you also figure that out with feet and inches too
yes but as others have commented here, the superiority comes not from the meter but from the system of multiplying everything by 10
imperial units aren't even the same in UK and US, e.g. gallons are way off
base 10 is dumb, dozenal systems are better. If only the French had gone through with dozenalism and made metric with base 12, things would've been glorious
not just 3, there are a lot more factors. 12 is (1,2,3,4,6,12) and within that 4 is divisible by 2, 6 is divisible by 2 and 3 vs 10 which is (1,2,5,10) and nothing special within that. Dozenal lets you do a lot of things that decimal doesn't, it's just kinda better for number sense.
You really see it when you talk fractions to someone who's done some kind of woodworking for decades with imperial units, even though we use decimal they still have fractions locked down, and that's partially just because of how the pieces of 12 play with each other, of course, anyone will be proficient after decades of experience but it's just different with that
