Hi, I think in metric units, so almost everything is some form of a power of 10, like a kilogram is a 1000 grams, etc.
Sometimes I will think of an hour and half as 150 minutes before remembering that it is 90 minutes.
Does something similar happen to imperial units users? Because as far as I understand you don’t have obvious patterns that would cause you to make these mistakes, right?
Your last sentence is correct. We don’t have obvious patterns that would cause us any confusion (beyond the confusion we already have with this measurement system that makes no sense), so we simply memorize it.
I can’t believe after all these decades, the USA still sticks with the imperial system. It’s nonsense. But I grew up with the imperial system so that’s what feels natural to me and I can “feel” what a mile feels like, I can “feel” what an inch feels like, but if you speak to me in metric, since we in the USA are not as exposed to it over here, I need to pull out my calculator to make the conversions to understand how a meter relates to a foot and a yard, yes I hate it, I would rather be able to think and feel in metric because it’s more logical.
imperial
Strictly speaking, it should be US customary units, not imperial. They’re mostly pretty similar or identical, but there are some substantial differences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint
The pint (/ˈpaɪnt/, listenⓘ; symbol pt, sometimes abbreviated as p) is a unit of volume or capacity in both the imperial and United States customary measurement systems. In both of those systems it is traditionally one eighth of a gallon. The British imperial pint is about 20% larger than the American pint because the two systems are defined differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_ton
The short ton (abbreviation tn) is a measurement unit equal to 2,000 pounds (907.18 kg). It is commonly used in the United States, where it is known simply as a ton, although the term is ambiguous, the single word “ton” being variously used for short, long, and metric tons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_ton
The long ton (symbol: LT[citation needed]), also known as the imperial ton or displacement ton, is a measurement unit equal to 2,240 pounds (1,016.047 kg). It is the name for the unit called the “ton” in the avoirdupois system of weights or Imperial system of measurements. It was standardised in the 13th century. It is used in the United Kingdom and several other Commonwealth of Nations countries alongside the mass-based tonne defined in 1799, as well as in the United States for bulk commodities.
I’m with you on going metric. It’s insane that we still use imperial units.
Congress passed a bill in 1975 that was supposed to transition us to metric, but it obviously didn’t take.
I end up using metric units quite regularly for various reasons. My intuitive understanding of imperial units is still better, which irritates me.
That’s fascinating. I’d never heard of that one. It apparently made the metric system legal for commerce, but did not try to implement it for general use.
So we have been trying to get this right for almost 140 years…and failing.
There’s some things imperial is just better at. Like temperature. 100 f is hot, but literally not even half as hot as 100 c. We as people can perceive imperial temperatures a lot better than metric.
In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree celsius—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the imperial system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
“we as people” - citation needed, lol.
But I don’t disagree with you. Of course we’d have to switch from kelvin to … Was it Rankine? … To keep everything consistent and some physics constants would have to change as well.
The advantage of the metric system is the scaling. The base value does not matter. We could measure everything in feet for all I care, but no inches or miles then! Only kilofeet, centifeet, millifeet, etc! And we need a better distinction between force and weight than “pound” and “pound-force” - seriously, whoever came up with must have had negative creativity.
On “we as people can perceive imperial temperatures a lot better than metric,” I’d agree to disagree here - Celsius is pretty straight-forward. Temperate is temperature, it’s just about what numbers you’re assigning to which temperatures.
0°C is when water freezes, and 100°C is when water boils. A 10°C day is cold, a 20°C day is mild, a 30°C day is hot, and a 40°C day is when you melt.
Whatever you grew up with is probably what is going to be easiest for you to comprehend, but Celsius is no more difficult or less perceptible, just a different value range.
For Fahrenheit It’s the more graduations between degrees in a range that’s easy to tell comfortability.
| Temps | easily relatable conditions |
|---|---|
| <0 | throw boiling water up in the air to make it snow |
| 0-10 | dangerous freezing cold |
| 10-20 | bitter freezing cold |
| 20-30 | freezing cold |
| 30-40 | coat cold |
| 50-60 | jacket cool |
| 60-70 | cool |
| 70-80 | pleasant |
| 80-90 | warm |
| 90-100 | hot |
| 100-110 | too damn hot for my fat ass/fry an egg outside |
If metric wanted to adopt a scale with more graduations that could be easily grouped to 10s, that’d be great. I don’t know why 0-100 was arbitrarily chosen to be the scale for water instead of 0-1000.
