“Inches in 8.33 feet”
“Mm in a foot”
Fool, the scientist in me is infuriated. Good work, mate!
This is one of the most stupid things I've ever seen. Good job.
Saturday Night Live actually had a good sketch about this a few weeks ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
Washington: "We fight for a nation where we choose our own laws... choose our own leaders... and choose our own systems of weights and measures.
I dream that one day, our proud nation will measure weights in pounds, and that 2000 pounds shall be called a ton."
Rebel: "And what will 1000 pounds be called sir?"
Washington: "Nothing. Cause will have no word for that."
...
Washington: "Distance will be measured in inches, feet, yards and miles. 12 inches to a foot!"
Rebel: "12 feet to a yard..."
Washington: "If only it were so simple. 3 feet to a yard."
Rebel: "And how many yards to a mile?"
Washington: "Nobody knows."
Rebel: "Ok, how many feet to a mile?"
Washington: "5280, of course! It's a simple number that everyone will remember."
1776-07-04
Sorting algos all agree.
Lolz. It's funny because it's so stupid.
I think the two points missing from most debates are
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The imperial system does a damn good job at measuring things the way a human would. A foot is roughly the length of a big foot. A single degree farenheit is just big enough that you could guesstimate it with enough practice. If the temperatures are negative, you dump sand on the roads instead of salt.
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It's like seven units of measurement in a trenchant. You never have to convert gallons to cubic miles. You never have to convert from dots to angstoms, and nobody has ever had to convert the surveyors mile to the nautical mile. It feels schizophrenic because claiming it's one singular system is like saying Italian, French, and Portuguese languages are all regional dialects of Europeanese.
My point isn't "it's not a bug, it's a feature", I'm saying for the average non-scientist there may be a logical reason why we like it so much
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Hard agree with metric for the most part. I forever stand by Fahrenheit for temperatures you experience, and Celsius for science. I don't want to have to use decimals in my everyday life, but that's just me
And really, K is the ideal temperature unit for scientific purposes, since there's actually a hard starting point, rather than picking an arbitrary state change at an arbitrary pressure of a kind of arbitrary compound.
1776-07-04 gang
I hate it
I'll grant that farenheit has merit, but for me, the foot/inches distance works a bit better for casual measurements, and stuff that doesn't have to be very precise.
Beyond maybe someone's height, I'd rather work in metric. I'm also very much in favor of celsius and I still have trouble converting between the temperature scales. I grew up with temps in degrees C, and height and some sort distances in feet/inches. IDK, I'm weird.
The date thing drives me nuts though.
Beer was the only drink you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin, though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten for a moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure of as soon as he came in.
"E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said Winston tentatively.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room that he expected the changes to have occurred.
'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer -- wallop we used to call it -- was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course.'
-1984
As an American, it is difficult because we inherently understand all measures and conversion in our heads is easy. We know what a centimeter or an inch looks like. We should strive to use only metric to make life easier for our din-witted cousins across the pond. Our Euro brothers have trouble with anything but the simplest representations of measure. The srltandard system of measure is ableist and unfair to the Euros.
