Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?
From John Bazell “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 centigrade—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 American 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.”
But we’re supposed to use Joules, not calories
I believe the calorie is a derived unit while the Joule is a base unit.
Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.
The calorie used to be the base unit, until we released in the 19th century “wait, heat isn’t a gas” and threw out caloric theory, and made the joule. Now the calorie is defined as 4.184 joules.
Yes, you’re right.
There have been multiple iterations of the “metric system” since it’s introduction in 1792–1795, most notably the original 1795 draft variant, then the CGS (Centimeter-Gram-Second) version, then the MKS (meter-kilogram-second) variant, with the most recent incarnation being the International System of Units (SI).
That’s why there are plenty of metric units, but not all of them are SI units. :)
Edit: Changed “1892–1895” to “1792–1795”. Lol, whoops.
It’s demonstrative anyway
I mean, 1btu is required per pound of water per degree Farenheit. About 8lbs/gal and raising it 142°f would mean 1136btus
that’s a lot of words and numbers for, “go fuck yourself”
Just remember to keep track of which BTU you’re using
Lol also which gallon for that matter
There’s a popular argument against religion that essentially says that if any trace of a specific religion were wiped off the face of the Earth, it would never come back. As in there’d probably be something in its place, but there’d be no way that the specific beliefs practiced by that religion would ever return. Whereas if a piece of scientific knowledge were similarly wiped from human knowledge, it would eventually be rediscovered.
A similar argument can be made with the metric system: I think that if standardized measurement systems disappeared from the face of the Earth today, something extremely similar would eventually be invented and adopted. It’s just too internally consistent and human mental math too grounded in decimal for it not to be. You’d probably even end up with a prefix-based (probably even Greek) naming scheme.
Now consider USC: the units fail to fit together in basically any meaningful way. They try but fail to be base-2, so you can’t even come at it from the already-tenuous angle of base-2 being better than base-10 (e.g. volume skips what two quarts would be, weight is more like base-16 (???), and distance just does something so insane that probably 95% of American adults couldn’t tell you how many feet there are in a mile). There are dozens of completely arbitrary, unintuitive, antiquated-sounding names (e.g. “horsepower”). Although the bases for metric measurements are rather arbitrary, they are extraordinarily precise, so much so that USC bases its own measurements off of insane but precise multiples of metric units. That’s not to say that humans would jump straight to metric or anything, but moreso that whatever would fill USC’s role as an intermediary between nothing and the metric-like system would likey be unrecognizable from current USC.
The “intuitiveness” of imperial measurements is that they’re sorta human-scaled, at least for human-sized measurements. An inch is about the same length as the tip of my thumb, a foot is about as big as my foot, a yard is a single pace if I stretch a bit, etc. which makes it easier for a person to picture it.
Once you get out of that scale it really starts to break down though.
And it’s sucks if you want any kind of precision. What’s half of 15 5/8? Fuck it, I’ll just use centimeters.
Yeah, the thing is that I actually don’t terribly mind feet, cups, etc. as individual measurements. Taken alone, they feel intuitive. The first of two main issues is, as you mentioned, scale. And you could make the argument that you could just take the base units like feet, cups, etc. and decimalize them with prefixes. And that does alleviate a ton of problems with USC, but you also then run back into the issue of unit intercompatibility.
Metric units have quite an elegant and intuitive interplay that USC simply lacks. What’s a liter? Why it’s a cubic meter. But now if I try to relate USC volumes to cubic USC distance measures, things quickly fall apart. A gallon is 231 cubic inches exactly, which is a whole number, sure, but that’s terrible for intution and for scaling. What’s a kilogram? Why it’s the mass of a liter of water. If you try relating pounds to units of volume, you might settle on one pound per pint, but that isn’t true, as it’s actually 1.041 pounds. So while it works at that scale, it quickly begins to fall apart and becomes completely inintuitive.
So unfortunately, even if we introduced intra-unit scaling by choosing one base unit and scaling that, working with USC would still be a nightmare when trying to intuit between different units. And this is, of course, not including things like horsepower that may have been intuitive 150 years ago but now are almost exclusively used 1) at minimum in the hundreds and 2) by people who have literally no concept of how much a horse can turn a mill wheel.
Calorie? Are they part of metric system? Everyone uses Joule.
Calories are metric but not SI.
… weighs one gram … An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say “An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it” (far less elegant) – but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.
the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019
What? It was necessary due to our observations of the universe (on every scale), not some arbitrary “fuckup”
Nope, this redefinition isn’t necessary, it is a choice SI made. Nothing would have broken by keeping an exact relationship between amount of substance and mass, it would just have retained the interpretation of Avogadro’s constant from before 2019 (experimentally determined vs a defined constant).
1917 shitpost with obstinate opinions held to this day. Brilliant!
I don’t think anyone believes the current system to be better, rather too much of a pain to replace. Americans really dislike learning and being inconvenienced.
I don’t think anyone believes the current system to be better,
Check our ShitAmericansSay (on Reddit, ew) and you’ll find plenty who argue that metric is worse.
Although, to be fair, British people say that too, especially when Britain joined the EU. “You mean I have to stop measuring the produce I sell in pounds and ounces?!”
And, of course, they still use MPH. I imagine there would be a massive uproar if that got changed.
British have gone much further with metrification than the U.S. but there’s still way too much resistance. And some of it is very silly indeed- weighing yourself in stone, which is a rather arbitrary 14 pounds.
7 pounds = 1 stone… got it. How much rock = 1 stone then? Or is rock more than stone?
Metric is undoubtedly an improvement, and if there were political will, I’d be all for a renewed push to make it the sole standard. Cultural inertia within a single large and wealthy country is pretty much the only “advantage” the older “system” has over metric.
I do get a little bit protective when people suggest that Imperial/Customary/whatever is nonsensical or useless, though. It’s more that it’s disjoint and obsolete. Units arise out of circumstances, and shit like using 12 inches to a foot makes a lot of division into fractions really easy. Same with 8 ounces to a cup, 16 to a pint, and so on. Dividing shit in half or thirds is a pretty easy paradigm to do math in your head if you’re not really getting a lot of formal education. Most of the base units ultimately trace back to something perfectly sensible for a pre-industrial society.
So there’s method to the madness, it’s just that it was a thousand different methods, arising from various trades and merchants trying to standardize (yet also retain) their traditional measurements for their own needs. There’s not the grand unified system that only really became workable with standardized manufacturing and improved communication in the 19th century.
The other funny thing is that while units can and do still cause confusion, many US Customary units are literally defined in terms of SI and have been for well over a hundred years. An inch, for example, is exactly 2.54 cm, because even in the 1890s Americans knew it was stupid to try match a metal stick in London to one in Washington to one in Paris with any greater precision than that, and only the SI had a set process to refine unit definitions in relationship to natural phenomena.
I did say that we hate learning. 😉
Australia joined the metric system on the 14th February 1966. It took about two weeks before it was running trouble free. Everything changed, including currency, on a single day. The system is pretty easy.
True! We used to use pounds, shillings, pence as our currency and I’m very glad I never needed to deal with that shit.
It has nothing to do with disliking learning. Trying to learn and use a system of measurement without being immersed in it is really hard. For years, I’ve set all my temperature measurements on my phone and thermometers to Celsius, but because I’m surrounded by people and systems that don’t use metric, I have to convert back and forth between the two. It’s a lot of mental effort for basically no gain.
Every day, customary speed and distance units and my intuitive understanding of them are reinforced when driving and seeing street signs. I know how long a kilometer is, but if you say “My brother lives 45 kilometers away”, I’d have a difficult time truly understanding that. I wouldn’t be able to estimate how long it would take to drive there, for example.
Another issue is cost. In my job, it would take weeks or months to update all of the documentation and code to metric. Then customers would have to approve of all those changes. A whole bunch of machinery still uses customary units too, so they would have to be replaced or updated.
I say all of this as a metric lover and evangelist. It’s not trivial to convert an entire massive country to metric. Countries that have converted already should be hugely proud of themselves for accomplishing a difficult task.
All I can say is that the metric system was predominantly taught in my American school experience, with US units mainly limited to math class. The only thing that sucked about using metric in science class is the short unit we had where we needed to convert measurements between metric and US, which I think was arguably the point.
It’s corporations, really, that seem to insist on having their products and tools still defaulting to US customary units, and I can’t fathom why. Even when you go abroad and try to buy a TV, they’re all still labeled in inches, which boggles my mind.
It’s corporations, really, that seem to insist on having their products and tools still defaulting to US customary units…
I am no corporate fan, but this one is not on them. They already sell the same products in metric everywhere else. If the US switched to metric, most corporations would be able to switch overnight.
Not likely, the production lines used to service other countries are probably not the same used to supply the US.
New equipment would have to be obtained, new processes developed based on differences with regional suppliers, different regulatory standards on the production process would have to be adhered to, and they’d lose out on the generations of compatibility with older standards that they are intent keeping as cost saving measures.
Overnight is a stretch, but could they switch given enough time? Almost certainly. But it’s a major unnecessary expense that doesn’t immediately benefit shareholders.
I doubt the corporations care in any deep way, same as with anything else. It’s just sort of a chicken and egg thing. They’ll resist change as long as resisting is cost-effective, but that very resistance slows adoption. Still, they will likely shrug and adapt if it becomes obvious that people prefer metric, or even simply stop caring.
Did you go to school in the 70s or 80s? I don’t think it’s like that anymore.
Probably depends on state. I went to high school in Washington state, just about a decade ago, and we were taught SI units in most science classes. Unit conversion was almost always one of the first lessons we had. Chemistry specifically made us learn sig figs, which is much easier to use with SI units, and made me wish we used them everywhere.
That’s probably what it is. I didn’t go to school in the US but my kids went to school in Ohio and my impression was that metric was not the primary system of units used in education, though it was taught.
The argument I hear most often from people defending the US customary units is that the units are more intuitive. For example, an inch is about the size of a thumb, or 0 degrees is fucking cold and 100 is fucking hot.
On the whole, people seem receptive to metric, but don’t want the hassle or cost to convert. They seem content to use metric where it’s important (science, military) and keep the old ways elsewhere.
I currently with in healthcare research and almost everything not patient facing is done in metric, but there are still conversions going on everywhere, leading to data problems that are hard to correct later. People used to thinking in ounces putting those where grams were supposed to go, and so on.
90’s-00’s in Massachusetts
Hundreds of millions of people learned the new units when their countries switched.
Inconvenienced might be right. The tagline from the poster treats metric implementation as a punishment. “What has he done to deserve this?” Has the same victimized tone like, “Look what they done to my boy” which completely disregards the merits of either system in favor of nationalism. It almost seems like a cold-war era ideal.
Start with adding a few metric characteristics in imperial. A yard and a meter are pretty close, so call it a kilo yard and centi yard. Same for quart and liter. It’s not switching to metric, but it’s more logical.
I suddenly really hate the newfound existence of potential milli-, micro-, and picoyard(s). Thanks.
Except that it has been replaced, or is not the preferred unit for trade and commerce. The SI has been the “preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” since 1975 according to United States law. Too bad most other Americans are too scared of change to use it everywhere else.
I have a friend who argues that “it’s just as good, there’s no difference really”. Then we go camping and have to do a unit conversion on how much water to boil and it takes 2 minutes and a phone calculator.
What was the point of this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?
Capital owners that don’t want to retool for a bullshit reason like “common good”.
Relabeling is such a chore.
Replacing all your tools and machines is super easy, though. /s
FWIW I only work in metric, Imperial is utter trash, tbh.
Why don’t you want to measure things by parts of a twelfth of a Roman foot?
of an approximation of a derivative of the Roman foot in metric*
The Roman foot was between approximately 0.96 and 1.1 international feet (most commonly about 0.97 ft, except in modern Belgium where it was 1.091 ft/13.1 in, the size of Nero Claudius Drusus’ foot). After that, the foot in Britain was based off the North German foot (~13.2 in), but in the late 13th century it became more like 12 in (so around the same as the modern foot). Later the English foot was between 11.7 and 12.01 in, and the US foot was based on the English foot until the 19th century when they made the US Customary Units and defined the foot as exactly 1200/3937 meters. The British made the British Imperial system and a bit later defined the foot as 1200/3937.0113 meters. They didn’t switch to metric because they saw “French Revolutionary units” (metric) as “atheistic”. Later, we advanced our understanding of physics, and the British adopted a foot of 304.8 mm in 1930, and the Americans followed them in 1933, based on the new “industrial inch” from the now-unused 1927 light wave definition of the meter (which used the International Prototype, made of a standard bar). The modern foot is defined as exactly 0.3048 meters, by international agreement in 1959 between some English-speaking countries, after the newer Kypton standard definition of the meter (which is also now not used).
Now it’s based on the modern meter definition (distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second, which is defined based on the uperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of a caesium-133 atom being 9192631770 Hz)
The really neat thing about those changes to the meter is that it didn’t really change how long a meter was (-ish), it changed the precision of that definition, as well as the ability to reproduce an exact meter, reducing the need for a specific piece of material to define the meter (which changes length based on environment). Now, an exact standard meter can be reproduced independently in any lab with the proper equipment.
What’s especially wild is that the kilogram was still an artifact in 2019! Every single calibrated weight in the world, big and small… They all could be traced back to a single metal chunk in a french vault.
Try farming in Canada. I will actually use liters per acre as a unit to measure in liquid fertilizer into a sprayer, spray it at gallons per acre and drive the sprayer at kph with a pump pressure in PSI on a field that was surveyed in rods.
It’ll get harvested by a machine that has all metric bolts and uses a 30’ cutting platform, the grain will be measured in bushels on the yield monitor and sold in $/bushel with the selling agent but the contract will be in tonnes and delivered that way.
And you have to do it in two languages too.
Well, chances are the Quebecers will have to learn English because I think ag equipment is exempt from dual language laws. At least I’ve never seen a part number for French manuals.
Poster shows the metric system giving Uncle Sam giant balls of steel?
Imperial emasculates.
Actually, I suspect those are balls of iron.
The more I read about America, the more I realise what a fucking stupid country it was, is, and will probably keep on being.
If I could read, I’d probably be insulted by this comment.
There are some pretty smart people in America tho
Indeed, too bad nobody wants to listen to them
Hence the effort to defund education.
As if people weren’t so fuckin dumb already.
Christ WTF year are we fucking in you guys?
How awful. Making someone divide things by 10 instead of 12, 16, or fucking 64.
10 can only be divided evenly by 2 and 5. 12 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, or 6. The Babylonians were right, base12 is superior to base10.
“Hey could I borrow a drill bit?”
“Sure, what size?”
“Seventeen sixty-fourths”
“Fuck you”
Sorry man I think in 2024 you’re objectively wrong.
You’re pointing out the problem in base10 having too many fractions that don’t divide cleanly. This is why base10 is shit.
Low IQ Base10: 17/64 = 0.265625
Equivalent expression in Chad Base12: 15/54 = 0;323
I’m enjoying you playing devil’s advocate here thoroughly.
Lemmy is so pigheaded sometimes with certain topics that all they see is one side of everything.
This post is about the metric system, not base 10 vs base 12. Metric is superior to imperial.
Also 15/54 is in no way more convenient than 17/64, I’m assuming you’re joking.
It’s the same number in different bases and divides out to 3 dozets(I made this up) in base12 and 6 digits in base10. Our friend you replied to was pointing out that it was a mistake to adopt base10 measuring instead of throwing out base10 counting because base12 fractions divide more easily due to the increased factors. And he was right.
Ok, I reread their comment and I see what you’re getting at. Base 12 would be better in many cases but I just don’t see anybody switching anytime soon. We would pretty much have to start over. If people had 12 fingers we probably would have started on base 12 to begin with.
Cultures that used base 12 counted on their finger joints with their thumb. 12 for each hand. Many common folk did that since you could count much higher if you counted by the dozen using both hands. Go from counting to 10 to finger counting to 12 dozen or a gross(144 in base10). Since we still have the English words for base12, you can see how close we were to adopting it.
I mean, some people do have twelve fingers.
And the metric system would be better still if it was base12. It’s time for a replacement.
The world if metric began in base 12:
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Let’s use BasePi then
“hey can I borrow a drill bit?”
“Sure, what size?”
“0.33333333333333333333333333333333 centimeters”
Metric drill bits are measured in mm and hardy anybody needs that much (0.33333… mm/cm) precision. I have a set of metric drill bits in 0.1mm increments and I personally might not ever need greater precision than that. Maybe in some lab environments they need greater precision but I imagine once you’re on that level it would be custom anyway.
0.33333… is what happens when you try to divide 10 by 3. This is because 10 is such a broken number that 1/3rd (a pretty common fraction) becomes an infinitely repeating decimal. In base12, 1/3rd is 4.0. Metric is broken by design because it’s based on base10. Lets take the lessons learned from the metric system and invent something new, something better, something base12.
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Yes, I learned about fractions and decimals in elementary school.
Then why are you simping for base10 when you know enough math to understand that base12 is superior
And 12 doesn’t divide nicely by 5. So what?
How often in real life do you want a 5th of anything? Is it more often than a third or a quarter? I bet it’s not
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Exactly. What we did was backwards. We shouldn’t have changed our measurement system to base10, we should’ve changed our counting system to base12.
You still can!
Stupid Achaemrnid Empire fucked us all
Mars Climate Orbiter.
How do you know they don’t use base12 on mars?
Well, someone did.
It’s possible! We can switch! I’m US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.
Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I’ve been shocked at how many people don’t realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using “Mexico units” once… Also, I’ve met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is… uh… interesting. The arguments y’all are having here are way more advanced than what I’ve run into.
For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that’s it. The weather says it’s 25c outside? Don’t convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Over time you’ll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.
Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…
It’s also helpful to remember that water boils at 100C and your body temp is about 36-37C. Helps me when I see the weather or something.
Room temp is ~21 degrees. That helped me a lot.
36.6°C. 37°C is on edge of healthy.
We actually were transitioning to metric when Carter was president and making progress. We did a lot of dual markings like highway signs, weather reports, etc.
The we ejected Reagan. And metric is used for pop and drugs.
Drug dealers just know what units system is superior
Oh is THAT why every American knows how big 9mm is
Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…
Biunitated?
For me it was particularly easy as it’s only Chevy and Ford cars that still use the imperial system for nuts and bolts so I’ve been making use of the metric system for pretty much every car I’ve worked on and I never really understood ferinhight to start off with as I only really cared about is it going to snow temperature wise so why memorize a number for something your only going to check one time in the year now that I’ve gotten accustomed to Celsius I’m now paying attention to if it’s going to rain or not
I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅
Uuummm… Ackshually Americans don’t use imperial units, they use united States customary units. Which are similar, but just a smidge different.
Lab rat here. I got you fam! Let’s collectively believe that BTU’s are real!
Wait…
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The medical system ended up using the metric system anyway
America has medical system?
Nope, that’s why they didn’t duck up with it
How many centimeters in a kilometer?
How many inches in a mile?
American answer: “Shut up, Euro-freak. I’m trying to watch Big Bang Theory reruns.”
Strange how you can easily work out the former, but the latter could be anything from 28 to 56285794
🤔
Nobody knows
The US Government is entirely metric. It’s just the US Citizens that aren’t. So there’s this entire separation where no one uses metric, so nothing is made for metric, since nothing is made for metric, no one uses metric.
Obviously that’s changing over time plenty of people use a mixture of both systems all the time. The machines are mostly driving adoption at this point. 3D printers, cars, etc.
Metric is just easier and the founders of the US actually considered it but wars -obviously- distracted them from switching to it.
