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Technically the metric system is “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” as per the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.
You’re just also allowed to use lbs and feet and stuff and most people do.
The versions of imperial measurements the US uses are even defined in terms of metric units, so they’re less a completely separate measurement system these days and more just a weird facade on top of metric, even.
Like PonyOS!
Nice observation, satansmaggotycumfart
blushes profusely
Aw, shucks.
And in the sciences and drug dealing and the military, we use metric exclusively.
But for some idiotic reason, construction engineers often use imperial units and I have no idea why. Like buildings are built in pounds and feet and stuff, with half inch bolts and 2x4 (ish) lumber and half inch plywood. It’s idiotic.
I don’t generally defend imperial, but feet and inches are actually really useful in construction. Base 12 is easily divisible by 2, 4, and 3. You often need to divide architectural elements in thirds.
I was a welder for years and I have to disagree. Using millimeters is way easier than inches, mostly because decimals are faster and easier to use than fractions. And it’s not that hard to divide 10 by 2, 3, or 4.
As a former structural engineer who lived on a Jobber 5 all day, that’s still pretty niche overall. Easier because it’s what your used to maybe, but outweighed by situations where it’s not. Try doing trig with fractions and then tell me imperial is better.
Does it matter whether you punch 3/8 or .375 into a calculator? Don’t tell me you calculate stuff by hand…
4 1/2 inches divided into 2 is 2 1/4. Finding center with imperial on a tape measure is actuality faster than metric. (I use a tape with both while fabricating).
Also (good) metric fasteners cost 50% more than imperial in the US. Unless it’s for a car, I don’t use metric to save money.
Trig is literally the math where you start dividing a circle in fractions and doing the math in base 360.
What the hell are you talking about?
I’m talking about trig using feet and inches. You know, rise, run, slope… Have you ever used trig outside of school? I don’t understand what you’re confused about.
right now i use it for waves and reflections. that’s all fractions and degrees. before it was machining and tbh for me that was faster to go to the book for the answers than calculate everything out.
truly trigonometry is a land of contrasts.
That might be somewhat useful if it was consistently applied, which it is not.
And it’s maybe useful for fractions, but how many feet are in a mile again? 5280? A square yard is what now… 1296 square inches?! Who the fuck is supposed to memorize all that?
What’s a 1/4 square yard in square inches?
That’s not easy, that’s putting the mental into mental arithmetic.
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Nobody divides miles by feet.
Yeah. Because it’s a shitty system.
It will be the same for kilometers.
Except it’s not.
People will either say „half a kilometre“ or „500 meters“, because that’s something you can actually easily calculate …
And your GPS will tell you „turn left in 100/200/etc m“, or and not „in a quarter of a mile“…
Again people making me defend imperial, I think metric is better.
I see this argument all the time, converting between these units is hard cause the numbers are weird. You have to stop thinking about imperial as a system, it’s not. No one should convert miles to feet, they are not intended to measure on the same scale.
None of the conversions are easy because imperial is just a random collection of units that were being used to measure different things.
Yeah, no one should be able to make a quick sanity check for things that span multiple powers.
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“Hey Bob, we have 5000 of those 78 ft rails, that enough for the 100 mile railroad?”
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“What do I look like, a fucking calculator?”
vs
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“Hallo Heinz, how mäny hecto-liter do ve kneed für 1000 0.5l bottles of Bier?”
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“20, boss.”
The amount of people going completely out of their way to die on their little cubic ft hill actually defending they’re incapable of easily and consistenly calculating units is just utterly ridiculous. “Nobody should be doing this!!!1!”
No, wait, the people in here telling people that “dozenal” is superior, but not realizing they’re not using a “dozenal” system at all, they’re just counting to twelve in decimal. Those are also making me question whether humans actually went to the moon…
Keep putting those words in my mouth. I’m not dieing on any hill, just trying to provide some context about why imperial is so weird. I still think metric is better.
You seem really upset about something that really doesn’t matter that much, are you okay?
Did I mention you specifically when I said „the amount of people…“? See.
And if it doesn’t matter much to you, why do you keep commenting? Nobody’s „making“ you defend anything. Are you okay?
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I don’t think they at any point said “it’s impossible to not build something that can be divisible by 4 and 3”
As an engineer it’s because the people building it complain if I draw in metric
“Give me eight cups of cocaine, good sir!”
There is tradition with buildings having measurements connected to the human body. It makes looking back at ancient ruins and cathedrals intriguing and people who learn that stuff want to hold onto it so it isn’t lost knowledge.
Screw that, we’ll make them use Metric. BY FORCE!
You are being democratized, please do not resist.
That’s no republic
Yep, that’s what Napoleon did…
And basically every other country in the world.
How do you plan to do that when each of us is issued an assault rifle at birth and our military is 20x bigger than the next closest military? In other words, bring it on!
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Have you tried cooking from a recipe lately? Or used a measuring tape? Or bought a gallon of milk? Driven a car with a speedometer? Swam a lap in a pool?
Wait, what unit do you guys measure a swimming pool in? Furlongs? Leagues?
Regan also never bothered to reinstate Imperial standards at the bureau of weights and measures (because it would have cost a small fortune). So our units are officially defined by the their metric counterpart. Legally speaking an inch is 2.54 centimeters.
Ah nice, this should be a constructive dialogue between open minded and empathetic individuals.
grabs popcorn
I’m struggling to understand the joke, can you kindly explain? Is this an imperial vs metric thing?
The joke is that British people have so little going for them that they must resort to making inaccurate jokes about outdated stereotypes based on cultural generalizations.
That’s not exclusive to the British, everyone does it.
Why are you bringing the British into this? What did they do to you?
They brought us the Imperial system.
When my American friends insist that feet and inches is just easier for them, I just nod in agreement and give them measurements using rods, chains and furlongs as well. If you’re going to go Imperial, you have to know 'em all. An acre is a chain by a furlong, totally logical as that would be 4x40 rods which is of course 43560 square feet. I guess it makes complete sense when your world is only a few furlongs across.
I’ve worked in both, and if precision isn’t as important as accuracy feet and inches, and only feet and inches, can be easier. A third of a foot is 4 inches, yay whole numbers. A third of a meter is 33.33 cm. Way harder to measure and calculate on the fly. If anything I’m working on has measurements or tolerances under a quarter of an inch, I prefer metric.
And why is 1/3 m harder than 2/7 foot?
That’s not a common measurement. So like if someone wants to split something in half, or thirds or fourths it’s easy to measure on the fly with feet/in. How often do you hear someone say “I want to cut this board into 2/7th pieces”?
1/4 of a meter is not not a common measurement but 25 cm is. I think it’s just a matter of whichever system you’re used to, like discussing which language is better.
That being said, meters are just more precise, hence why american measurements are all defined by metric and then turned into feet, thumbs and dicklengths.
Well not a board but I often have situations where I need to divide by more than a third or a quarter.
Usually I use a calculator since I am on the pc anyway. But I don’t see the advantage over Imperial. I only have to shift my comma for conversion (which I need much more often than calculations) in Imperial I would go crazy
I mean, it really depends on your line of work. I work in physics and I often just say 1e-9 m instead of converting to nm. Or I’ll say 1e-4 in instead of .1 mil (a mil is one thousandth of an inch). So I just don’t care what unit system I work in when I do science related work, as long as the units are explicitly stated so that you don’t compare inches to mm on accident.
I have multiple relatives in construction though and they seem to like being able to just divide boards into thirds without dealing with decimals.
In the end though, now that everyone has calculators in their pockets, it’s all arbitrary. It’s so trivial to convert between different units and unit systems.
A third of a foot is 4 inches, yay whole numbers. A third of a meter is 33.33 cm.
Yeah, but a foot is about 30 centimeters. Easy to calculate half, a third, a fifth, a sixth of that. Yay. Whole numbers.
Not particularly hard to measure and calculate on the fly.
For what it’s worth, a chain is a literal standardized metal chain that surveyors used when physically staking out parcels. It’s not a unit normal people have ever used.
An acre is a chain by a furlong because a furlong is the distance you’d plow with an ox, and an acre is about the area you’d plow in a day. They derived the standard chain from that, much as metric chains are 20 meters or 30 meters. France used to use 10 meter chains, with 20cm links.
Normal people don’t measure things in chains, whether metric chains or imperial.
But what happens if you have a weak ox or a really fast ox? Then the distance would change, affecting the area, no?
The main issue is, over great distances, the chains will stretch so the measurements will end up varying.
I mean I can respect that if they’ve just really known imperial forever. I just take issue with them confusing it being easier for them for that specific reason with it being intersubjectively better, which is dumb.
A truly logic system would be entirely designed around a base-12 number system. But we were born with an imperfect set of 10 fingers and that doomed us.
Those aliens have 6 fingers. It’s an absolutely ironic twist that their discussion on measuring systems is super illogical for them, and yet logical is the verbiage they use.
Care to elaborate on how base 12 would be better than base 10 in this case?
I’ve heard before it’s because 1/3 can be represented as a whole number.
Just like feet, which can have 12 inches. But if we want to get more precise we start cutting inches into eighths for some reason 😅
old school carpenters’ squares also have inches divided in 12.
Because 12 is more than 10 and more is better.
7.62mm is more than 5.56mm but 'muricans (fuck yeah) still chose AR-15s because freedum. Where is your God now? /s
I’m american and chose 7.62 three times in the forms of SKS, AK-47, and AK-104. Big bullet go boom.
Basically it’s because 12 is more divisible than 10. Factors of 10 are 1,2,5 and 10. 12 has 1,2,3,4,6 and 12. This gives more flexibility when discussing numbers. Our time is technically using base 12, which is why we can say quarter past 4 and it means a traditional whole number. That’s the argument I’ve heard anyway
Base 10 is the most easy to scale, you just move the coma and add 0s. Base 12 doesn’t allow that easily
A base 12 number system would have two extra symbols. Twelve would be written 10 and be called ten, and the number 144 would be written 100 and be called one hundred.
Everything you may think is inherent to base 10 is largely not. The quirky rules of 9’s multiplication table would apply to 11’s. Pi and e would still be irrational, and continue being no no matter which base of N you choose. Long division would work the same. Etc.
What if I choose base Pi? Then pi = 1
Checkmate.
Oh nvm, you did say base of N, but that’s boring.
I bet you love radians.
Can’t spell radians without rad 😎
You can just assign digits to ten and eleven?
Yep. In computer science you sometimes need to calculate with hexadecimal numbers where 10-15 are the letters A-F. You just use another factor for scaling “easily”.
In hexadecimal 10 is 16 in decimal. So if you do C * 10 it’s C0 but that is 192 in decimal (12 * 16, remember the base is 16).
Whats cool though is that (all hexadecimal):
10 / 2 = 8
10 is 2 to the power of 4 which means 10 is divisible by 2 4 times.
Similarly (and arguably even cooler) with a base 12 system 10 is divisible by 2 AND 3!
10 / 3 = 4
10 / 2 = 6
You can count your 12 finger-parts with your thumb, once you go over 12 on one hand, go back to 1 and count one more on the other hand
Have fun counting on one hand, writing with the other, or counting to 100 dozenal on just two hands!
I’ll also defend fractional measurements over decimal to my dying breath. Decimal measurements can’t express precision very well at all. You can only increase or decrease precision by a power of 10.
If your measurement is precise to a quarter of a unit, how do you express that in decimal? “.25” is implying that your measurement is precise to 1/100th - misrepresenting precision by a factor of 25.
Meanwhile with fractions it’s easy. 1/4. Oh, your measurement of 1/4 meter is actually super duper precise? Great! Just don’t reduce the fraction.
928/3712 is the same number as 1/4 or .25, but now you know exactly how precise the measurement is. Whereas with a decimal measurement you either have to say it’s precise to 1/1000th (0.250), which is massively understating the precision, or 1/10000th (0.2500), which is massively overstating it.
Fractional measurements are awesome.
No measured value will be perfectly precise, so it doesn’t make sense to use that as a criteria for a system of measurement. You’re never going to be able to cut a board to exactly 1/3 of a foot, so it doesn’t matter that the metric value will be rounded a bit.
Not “a bit”. You can have a 9x difference in precision and be unable to record it.
i’ve never heard of anyone using non-reduced fractions to measure precision. if you go into a machine shop and ask for a part to be milled to 16/64”, they will ask you what precision you need, they would never assume that means 16/64”±1/128”.
if you need custom precision in any case, you can always specify that by hand, fractional or decimal.
But you can’t specify it with decimal. That’s my point. How do you tell the machine operator it needs to be precise to the 64th in decimal? “0.015625” implies precision over 15,000x as precise as 1/64th. The difference between 1/10 and 1/100 is massive, and decimal has no way of expressing it with significant figures.
I’m scratching my head, wondering why all the downvotes.
I’ve always sucked at math tbh, but fractional measurements are my jam. It goes faster in my head and I can visualize things better.
When I find a wood working video on YouTube from the states it blows my mind how anyone can not just adopt metric “This is 5” 4/57 and we need to cut it to 5” 5/45 and a half” bzzzzzzz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUpwa0je6_Y
In case the metric folk want to write it down and work it out yourself:
7" 1/4 minus 6" 7/8 = 184mm minus 174mm
7" 1/4 minus 5" 5/8 = 184mm minus 142mmI may be biased, but I think it kinda makes sense. All the fractions are really just powers of two:
One half
One quarter
One eighth
One sixteenth
One thirtysecond
etc.Oh yeah, totally makes more sense to say “it’s 3/64ths of an inch” than “it’s 2 millimeters.” Completely reasonable.
So reasonable, in fact, that in most manufacturing that still uses imperial measurements they long ago abandoned fractions and moved to decimal inches.
Which leads to unholy abominations such as the wood shop sending over “cut off 3/64ths” and the metal shop cutting off 0.046875".
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how about we all agree that the best system is american units with metric prefixes. After all it is obvious that it takes an hours to drive 318 kilofeet
What’s that in centimiles?
I love the smell of Kilofeet in the morning 😂
“Why do they use the much more complicated system?” “Nobody actually knows.”
I’m not defending it, but it’s because 12 has more factors than 10
10 has 2 and 5
But 12 has 2,3,4,6
So 1/2 ft, 1/3 ft, 1/4ft and 1/6 ft all have a whole number of inches
But it doesn’t use base 12. Take distance. Values smaller than 1/64" are measured using “thou”, “tenths”, and “millionths”, which are decimal multiples of 1/1000’, 1/10000", and 1/1000000" respectively.
Values between 1/64" and 1" are measured using dyadic rationals, i.e. base-2 fractions.
Above 1" it’s mostly base 12,except for the yard.
So all imperial measurements are factors of 12 apart?
Using a base12 system would only make sense if we all started counting in base12 too.
If enough people want that, i’d be down to start counting in base12, but i don’t think many people will lol.
Okay, so why inches divided into 8ths?
And why are there 16 cups in a gallon, 15-and-some tablespoons in a cup and 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon?
Better make it 12 tablespoons in a cup and 12 cups in a gallon, then!And why are there 14 pounds in a stone and 16 ounce in a pound?
The imperial system does not use dozenal.
It uses a clusterfuck of bases because it’s actually a clusterfuck of measuring systems in a really big trenchcoat
Silly Americans, you could be measuring your winnies in GIGAMETERS and yet decide to keep using the kings thumb as a reference for it*
Me with a 1.0x10^-11 GIGAMETER weenie: 😎
Those aliens have 3 fingers. A decimal system to them is like a system based on 14, 196, 2744, 38416, … would be like to us - probably worse than US Customary
14, 196, 2744, 38416, … would be like to us - probably worse than US Customary
I mean if they had a base 14 numerical system then a base 14 measurement system would make perfect sense.
Contrary to that, the US does use a decimal system for numbers while the various units in the US customary system do not have any common base.humans have used base 8 count the gaps between your fingers, base 12 count the joints on 4 fingers with your thumb, and base 26 by using lots of body parts.
Number of fingers doesn’t have to dictate their number system. If they’re using a decimal based number system, then a decimal based measurement system is still the logical choice.
It partially does, the percentage of languages that use base 10 is nearly 100 and most that don’t use base 5 or 20… Sure there’s others (60 being the main one that still has an effect on most people’s lives) but they’re vanishingly uncommon
It does though. Base 10 is entirely due to humans having 10 fingers.
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Base 12 is not organically common, it’s incredibly rare even with the modern counting systems we’ve discovered…
The frequency of emergences (based on language families that use them) are: 4 ~1 time, 5 ~4 times, 6 ~3 times, 8 ~2 times, 10 ?? times, 12 ~3 times, 15 ~1 time, 20 ~9 times, 20+5 ~2 times, 23 ~1 time, 24 ~1 time, 27 ~1-2 times, 32 ~1 time, 60 ~2 times
If we had 8 fingers, or 3 fingers, or 15 fingers, we would still be using base 10. It’s just that the value of “10” would be different each time
Yes but (1) that isn’t the only base system humans use and (2) aliens could use a base system entirely divorced from their body parts. So number of fingers doesn’t have to dictate which base system is used.
They have 3 fingers on each hand and 2 toes on each foot. 10 total.
No, the problem with the imperial system is not what number it’s based on. The problem is that it’s not based on any number. A coherent base 14 system would be easier to use than the madness that is imperial.
There’s no good way to predict what base they’d actually use for their numbers, but there’s definitely nothing about 10 that makes it an obvious choice for an inter-species standard line the comic implies.
3, 6 or 12 would be overwhelmingly likely though, inferring from all documented human language families
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Man I love this comic. Glad to see it on Lemmy!
It’s not that a system based on base 6 would be strange. That’d be a logical system, too. Just as any other system that consistently uses a particular base.
However, a system that uses numbers of base whatever but then proceeds to jump from one unit to the next one in completely arbitrarily sized steps such as 3; 22; 10; 8; 3 is illogical in any base.
One of his books explains it with 3 fingers on each hand and 2 toes on each foot - so a base-10 system makes vague sense for those beings.
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Because it’s intuitive. Calculating orders of magnitude is literally just a matter adding or removing significant digits.
That’s literally the same way with any other base. We just defined orders of magnitudes to be multiples of 10 because we use base 10. We could just as well have used other multiples.
Base 12 is way more logical than base 10, I bet aliens would think we’re stupid for counting in base 10 just because we have 10 fingers, my opinion on this is infallible fight me
why is 12 better
Or heximal/senary. Arguably imperial is already duodecimal/hexadecimal/sexagesimal for the fractional parts.
Why use decimals when reducing fractions is SO EASY
I’m just gonna drop this here: https://iquilezles.org/articles/floatingbar/
At least Americans are consistent. I think Canadians are the most confused.
Height: imperial
Weight: imperial
Long distance: metric or time
Short distance: feet
Cooking: imperial
Filling gasoline: metric
Temperature: Celsius
Height of mountains: metric
Cruising altitude: imperial
Temperature of ovens: imperial
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Looking forward to your new animated series!
I feel like this is my wheel house.
