It seems like a weird point to bring up. How often do y’all convert your measurements? It’s not even a daily thing. If I’m measuring something, I either do it in inches, or feet, rarely yards. I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this. When I have needed to, it’s usually converting down (I.e. 1/3 of a foot), which imperial does handle better in more cases.
Like. I don’t care if we switch, I do mostly use metric personally, it just seems like a weird point to be the most common pro-metric argument when it’s also the one I’m least convinced by due to how metric is based off of base 10 numbering, which has so many problems with it.
Edit: After reading/responding a lot in the comments, it does seem like there’s a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries. I can’t quite put my finger on how, but it seems the difference is bigger than 1 mile = 1.6km
Because we are used to it and doing extra mental acrobatics for any conversions seems unnecessary.
You use money right? $1 = 100 cent, thousand is 1000 dollars or 100 000 cents. Imagine if somebody suddenly tried to tell you their money is just as easy to use when in their system $1 = 187 cents and thousand means 987 dollars, or by conversion 184 569 cents. Would you not see that as ridicilulous?
No, actually, I heard about the Brits decimalizing their currency, and thought it was an unfortunate choice. It was 20 shillings to a pound, 12 pence to a shilling, and I do actually, genuinely, unironicqlly think having 240 cents to a dollar is better than 100. 144 would be better, but 240 is still better than 100 imo
You’ve never had to add measurements with mixed units?
Ie. 1lb 2oz + 4lb 15oz?
Or heights, 5ft 10in + 6ft 5in?
Rarely outside of a school setting
I’m honestly surprised you’ve never had to do that, because it happens to me all the time.
Like when I’m approaching a junction on the road and the satnav suddenly changes from saying 0.5 miles to like 500 yards, that’s jarring and breaks my mental countdown. (In Britain, the roads are imperial, yes it’s a pain.)
Or if I’m cooking an old recipe and it needs 12oz of something, but I’m doubling the quantity, suddenly I need to know what that is in lb and oz because my scale doesn’t just tell me 24oz.
Or if someone says they’re 5’ 8" tall, I have to know how many " in a ’ to conceptualise how close that is to 6’.
Meanwhile, I know when I’m out hiking what my pacing is for 100m, and if I’ve got 2.5km to go, that’s 25 lots of pacing.
Or when I’m sewing, and fabric is sold by the metre but all the pattern pieces are measured in cm or mm.
And not strictly related, but it’s handy being able to measure out water in an unmarked container using a weighing scale and the fact that 1l=1kg.
I think part of it is being used to it (I do just kiiiinda know that 5’8" is 4" shy of 6’, but I blame the same nerdiness that lead me to knowing what links, chains, and furlongs even are for that one), and the other part is I use metric in the kitchen, and don’t follow recipes directly a lot of the time. I have some master recipes memorized that get used.
My GPS doesn’t do a 500ft callout (kinda wish it did), it’s usually 200, which my brain translates “Slow down now or you will miss the turn” because the announcement is often a little behind, so it’s jarring for other reasons. Also your GPS says yards?? Mine only does feet/miles, and mine’s weird and verbally calls out “Five tenths of a mile” when I’m walking to the store.
I actually do conversions on the regular but than again I live in Europe so I use the metric system and all conversions are base 10 so it is super easy. Take distance for example:
- 0.5 km
- 500 m
- 50 000 cm
- 500 000 mm Etc…
How often do y’all convert your measurements?
It’s second nature in metric. All the time.
Judging by your post, it sounds like that’s not the case in imperial. But you need to understand that especially converting between mm, cm, m, and km, for example, is not just extremely common, it’s just normal. If you add up 10 times a 1000 meters, you don’t call that 10000 meters, that would be awkward. You say it’s 10 km.
We convert all the time, so that’s why we assume the same must be the case in imperial and thus the easy conversions must be focused on because clearly they would get you to understand why metric is superior.
Tl;dr: I think the different imperial units represent a shift of scale that just doesn’t happen in day to day life, given how different most of the common ones are.
Yeah, we largely… Don’t? We’re much more likely to 10x10 feet is 100 feet instead of 33 yard+1 foot. Even if we do go with something that ends on 99 feet I don’t know anyone who would convert that to yards, even the GPS just says “In 200 feet turn right.”
Anything above about 600 feet gets talked about in fractions of a mile. 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, etc, but if we’re talking feet and go into that most would just stick with feet. 200+460 feet is 660 feet, not an eight of a mile, despite being an eighth of a mile.
If we’re talking the “equivalent” to 10x1000 meters, we’d start talking about miles, not feet/yards xD I think it’s because going from one unit to the other represents a shift in scale that just doesn’t get run into frequently in day to day life? Because a yard is about a meter, 1 meter is about 7.5cm shorter, which is negligible for this discussion. A mile is 1,760 of those. I know that conversion because I’m a nerd, I doubt most people do, because it’s not common enough in day to day life to need it. Land surveyors might, I’d assume they’re more likely to know a lot of weirder ones, like feet to chains (66 feet), and maybe furlongs (10 chains) over the direct yard/miles conversion, since chains/furlongs were made for that profession, but I’m not, and don’t know a surveyor so I can’t say for sure.
I see where you are coming from and I agree that the big advantage of the metric system is not specifically conversion or anything in particular, but in general that everything fits together due to the coherent units and ratio.
How often do y’all convert your measurements? It’s not even a daily thing.
It’s not literally an active daily task, but the effortless conversion benefits your mental image of measurements in general and you don’t even have to think about the conversion in the first place. I do not think you are unique in this though. When you live in a place that uses the imperial system (sorry for assuming. Correct me, if I’m wrong), your personal benefit of using the metric system is limited in your daily life.
but in general that everything fits together due to the coherent units and ratio
Isn’t what you call coherent units and ratio just another word for conversions?
How do you differentiate them then?
I used it a few times with measurements around the house but sure, it’s not a daily occurrence.
What most annoys me about imperial are the recipes. Why the fuck do you not weigh your ingredients? Instead you have to put everything in these measuring cups, shake it or even press it in so it sits flat. How many carrots is 1 cup of diced carrots? With experience you will know but if it said grams, you could weigh the whole thing in the store and be done with it. It doesn’t need to be very precise with cooking but you get the idea.
But don’t get me started on baking recipes…
I think a lot of that is tradition, since imperial almost certainly predates scales being an everyday item. Annoys the shit out of me, too, though, so I use metric in the kitchen, because I have a scale xD It does depend on the recipe, though. For pancakes I just use a jug, put the egg/butter/salt/etc in, then fill up to the 2 cup mark, then add in half cups of flour until it looks right, but at that point it’s not really measuring anything beyond the total liquid content. Easy recipe, though, and good pancakes.
The crazy thing is that for some recipes it doesn’t even matter the exact amount, but for others it does.
When I was taking chemistry, we had specific instructions to indicate that it didn’t matter exactly how much of something you used, verse when it did matter.
Cups were invented by the pioneers. It’s easier to carry a cup around than to carry scales and a whole bunch of weights around. There is little no reason to still use cups.
TIL.
Crafty buggers
The best arguments for metric is that you get to travel slightly faster for an equivalent speed limit (100 kph > 60 mph) and only needing to own one set if wrenches
I own one wrench, and it’s adjustable :P
My own heathenism aside, that speed limit would likely end up being 65; speed limits that end in 0 are kinda rare here? It’s usually 25, 35, 45, etc unless it’s a speed trap. It’s something I noticed a while ago, and can’t quite figure out why, so it’s stuck with me. Might actually have to look into that at some point.
It’s not my measurements I need to convert, it’s other people’s. Don’t forget, American content is pretty overrepresented on the internet, so I actually need to do conversions pretty regularly.
Beyond the day to day, a spacecraft has burned up in the Martian atmosphere and an aircraft has run out of fuel mid-flight because of unit conversions not being done. These happenings aren’t very common, but the repercussions can be pretty big when they do, and the fact that this is a completely self-inflicted problem just makes it worse. Also, the shipping industry spends a good amount of money on unit conversions.
As for the problems with base-10, certainly a system based on base-12 would in principle be better (mind you, imperial isn’t one either). The problem is our numerals are base-10 and so our intuitions around numbers are based on that. 12 can still be dealt with, but once you get to 144 or 1728, it gets a lot harder. I can certainly name more integer divisors of 100 and 1000 off the top of my head despite having fewer of them.
That wasn’t because of unit conversions, that was a major failure of systems management.
I say this as someone in IT where we have multiple no involved people verifying work we do. Mistakes happen, so you have external validations. I’m not even permitted to touch the systems for which I’m responsible - I have to document changes, with extensive lab testing that is vettwd by someone who’s never seen these systems.
NASA should be shamed for dropping the ball so badly.
Ams those are the only two cases you can come up with, compared to the trillions it would take to convert, and the billions of errors that would occur with trying to convert now.
Just look at a single machine shop, that’s using large from 1945 (because that’s all they need for accuracy). Should they upgrade their lathes to new ones with metric indicators? How much steel isn’t going to take, coal, aluminum, energy just to transport the lathe to that one shop.
Then all their tools. The world doesn’t have the manufacturing capability just to make measurement tools for all the industries that would need it.
And then you’d still have the conversion problem between one business and the next during the decade’s long transition. How many conversion mistakes do you think would happen then?
You people who scream about this all the time have never had to even look at what it would take. You act like it’s a simple problem.
Testing and validation are very important, but they’re no replacement for structurally making mistakes as impossible as possible to make in the first place. In fact, that was the conclusion from the Gimli Glider incident, that using mixed units increases the likelihood of mistakes being made, and so they stopped doing that. It’s kind of absurd to acknowledge that people make mistakes and therefore their work needs to be validated, but when the people doing the validation also make mistakes, they get all of the blame even when the people who made the thing did things in a way that increased their chances of making mistakes when they could have chosen not to.
Also, that’s some contrived scenario you’re painting.You make it sound as though every machine shop in the US would have to replace all of their equipment. First of all, for anything computer-controlled the units are arbitrary and software-defined. But even for purely (electro-)mechanical machines, it’s not like those can’t be (and aren’t already) modded up the wazoo. Why replace the entire machine when you can just swap out some of the gears or even just the dial? If a machine has been around since 1945, they’ll have done things like that many times already.
Of course no transition is going to be instant or painless, but it’s better than keeping up this situation forever. I mentioned two incidents because they’re the most dramatic, but things like that happen every day and the cost of lesser incidents also builds up. Somehow, almost all of the rest of the world managed to go against centuries if not millennia of tradition and momentum and transition in a fairly short amount of time during a period when precision engineering was already a thing that happened at a large scale, but the US is special? Give me a break.
Oh, absolutely. And all of those are better arguments than “It’s easy to go from meters to km! Just shift a few decimals!” despite the latter being the more common argument I see.
And yeah, imperial isn’t base 12 either. I do think base 12 numbers would be better, and I would have exactly 0 reservations about metric if we did, though it’s not like I’m exactly anti-metric now. I use it probably about as much as I use imperial day-to-day
Well, I do think that has value too. This example is going to be fairly specific to my situation, but as a programmer working on simulation software, it’s not uncommon for me to see or need to enter values in terms of meters that I think of as being in the realm of kilometers. Being able to reason more intuitively about these distances just by moving the decimal point around instead of having to multiply/divide them by 5280 or something is helpful. And the reason I have this intuition to begin with is because I use the same units in everyday life. This does require the system of units to be based on multiples of 10, however.
I think the best ‘conversion’ thing in metric is not the mm/cm/m/km type ones but the volumetric type ones: a cubic metre of water/ 1 tonne / 1000 litres
What’s the equivalent un US units? 1 cubic yard / 1684.8 pound / 807.8961039 qt / 25852.675325 oz ?
Even then I don’t find the weight particularly useful, because it only applies to liquids with the same density of water.
Also 1 gallon is 231 cubic inches. Idk why, but it is, and I’ve already looked into all of the weird imperial measurements previously xD
231=3711, just in case you wanted to buy enough to give each of your three children 11 cubic inches of orange juice every day for a week.
Ahh, yes, the classic two and a half eggs of daily OJ
ok, so i have a liquid (honey) with density of about 1.4 g/ml that is 1.4 tonne for the m^3
You had the same density of ~11.5lb/gal what is the above calculation?
just look at all that maths https://measuringstuff.com/how-much-does-a-gallon-of-honey-weigh/
[edit, shit my spelling is bad this morning]
They’re just annoyed that we use a different system with no upside when the rest of the world all chose to establish a consistent measurement system.
Which is fair enough. But now I’m annoyed that they keep complaining about it.
tbh… being in Canada sucks ass because of it.
here’s a fun flowchart for Canadians and living with both
and don’t get me started on date formatting…
wtf is 1/4/2026. is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
As always, the only correct date format is ISO 8601
WHOOOO ISO-8601 FAN CLUB!!!
[Cheers and goes running out the door]
Correct! And yet…
wtf is 2026/1/4? is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
Though to be fair the chances of ISO 8601 goes up when year comes first
The date part of ISO 8601 doesn’t have slashes, it has dashes and requires double digits: 2026-01-04
I mean, if it’s normalized to ISO 8601, then you KNOW that’s January 4th even without dashes or slashes. (although preeeetty sure the standard would require zeros before the 1 and 4 in either case)
Oof. A good while back, I worked in a US-based company with offices globally, and they upgraded to a global ERP system. At launch of the new system, documents (such as purchase orders) printed with dates in MM/DD/YYYY format. Thankfully, my suggestion to change that to DD Mmm YYYY (eg. 31 Jan 2026) was quickly implemented without any pushback, but it totally blows my mind that a company operating globally would default to such an ambiguous date format.
yyyy-mm-dd is superior it is unambiguous and sorts well.
So you usually take your water for cooking out of the pool? ;-)
The fucking date problem I can get behind with you.
I always use year/month/day now, which pisses off everyone but computers sort it properly every time.
It seems to also be different between provinces. I was shopping in Ontario (from BC) and the fruit was in ounces, which threw me. And at least in BC schools cooking class uses metric not cups.
They keep complaining about it because we keep using the worse system for no reason. /shrug
It’s a better system for me, because I already know it.
Metric is very easy to learn, so I’m not sure I’d go around flaunting that reason…
It is easy to learn how to convert between metric units. But that’s not what people mean when they talk about “learning metric”. They mean having an intuitive sense for how much, say, 100 meters or 100 milliliters is. Again, the emphasis on how easy it is to remember the conversion between meters and kilometers is extraneous.
500 meters = 0.5 kilometers 🤷♂️
Yea, that’s the really easy part. It just takes exposure on a level that’s more than twice a month and it’s practically by osmosis.
The conversions are the hard part.
And that’s how I know you’re an American!
Same reason the metric people keep telling me to change. Because if I did, it would be better for them. Difference is, I don’t drone on and on about how superior my forms of measurement are
I mean, it does have the noted benefit of down-converting between units being cleaner. 1/3 of a foot is 4 inches. 1/3 of a meter is 333.333…mm
I mean, you kind of cherry-picked there. A third of an inch is…?
1 barleycorn.
This is mental illness
Its all cherry picking.
Do people struggle that much more to divide dollars compared to feet?
I mean I totally get that base 12 is pretty cool for calculator-less maths (though not as cool for base 60) but ultimately, we still have a base 10 numbering system.
So yea, base 10 units for base 10 numbers. Using the same all the way down makes it easier to learn how to handle the more complicated divisions in all cases, you don’t have to switch logic if you see what I mean.
Of course, to each their own. The best case for metric remains that it’s the system everyone else has agreed on.
I mean, not really, it’s just the lack of factors that comes from having a base 10 numbering system, which is my the single big issue I personally have with metric. I still think it should be adopted, generally, because standards are good, and in the modern world it makes more sense. I just also think we should be doing base 12 instead of base 10 xD
Ooh what are the problems with base ten?
Dividing my thirds sucks.
Base 12 ftw
I’m pretty sure metric plywood is 120cm by 240cm. You can have twelves in your tens.
3 1/3.
You don’t have to use a decimal point…
Hey! There’s nothing wrong with a little 3,333333333333333333333…∞
In order:
- Dividing by 3
- Dividing by 4
- Dividing by 6
- Dividing by 7
- Dividing by 8
- Dividing by 9
It’s really, really bad at handling dividing by anything but 1, 2, 5, or 10. Dividing by 3 is very frequently useful imo
That’s fair, I am pretty jealous of that 12 inches in a foot conversion. That a juicy one.
But then again, we rarely divide 1 or 10 of something. A third of a meter. 0.33333 meters? Wtf is that? Nah, just use centimeters instead. A third of a hundred. 33 cm! There we go. That’s the length of the rulers we had in school. I can even measure that shit using just my eyes.
Need even more precision? 333 millimetres, fuck it’s getting hot in here 🥵
I gotta chill out
If we need precision it’s 333.333 mm xD
Dude, we round that shit. But don’t worry, I got more precision that you can even fathom. Let’s go, 3333 μm… 33333nm… to the moon
Yes I’m high
BOOOR-IIING!
I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this.
100% this. Look, imperial may be silly, but some of the arguments for changing to metric are also very silly. Things are usually at a mile scale or a foot scale, and I don’t really need to go between the two.
And sure, converting between different units is convenient in metric, but how often do you have to do that? So you can easily tell me how many liters of water would be needed to fill a giant, square kilometer fish tank, but who needs to do that? What grade school math problem are you living in?
There is one conversion that I use every now and then: liter to kilo: A liter of water weighs about a kilo.
Helpful to compare groceries when some products use weight and others volume. For example, I can buy 1kg buckets of yoghurt. I then know that those buckets hold about 1 liter. Handy when re-using the buckets.
I do stuff like this all the time. Like if i bought a pool i wanted to estimates how much water it needes to estimate all the follow up costs, if i am cooking something i often switch between kg and g, if am measuring things i switch between cm, m and mm depending on what i am currently measuring all the time. E.g. i needed a new working plate in my kitchen, i wanted it precut to fit exactly in after moving some cabinets while still aligning the sink. The whole space was measured in meters, but the individual cuts were all measured in milimeters. I was able to do all of that in 5 minutes with one piece of paper for sketching and my head. (And it fitted down to the milimeter in the end).
Or e.g. in my last appartment we had an weird electrical water heater that didn’t work that well. I was able to easily estimate the extra cost it procured by estimating water volume, temperature difference and electrical price, most annoying par was converting from joule to calories because it is not base 10. (would have taken >3years so not worth it for me)
For evidence of the mile scale vs foot scale bit:
We have 2 measurements between that we don’t really use anymore. Chains, and furlongs most notably (8 furlongs to a mile, 10 chains to a furlong, 100 links to a chain, 4 inches to a link). The middle distance is just yards now. 50 yards, etc.
Actually, because a chain is 66’, a link is 0.66’ or 7.92".
A furlong is then 660’, so 220 yards, which is 201.17m.
A mile, being 8 furlongs is then roughly 1.6km
Ahh, right, mixed up the measurement between hand and link. I was tired, and neither units get thought of much xD I also keep forgetting it’s one of the only units that isn’t a flat number.
Because the ability to easily convert between meters and kilometers is the only intrinsic benefit that metric has over any other form of measurement.
Some say imperial has some other benefits, like being easy to do math in your head with… but I’m skeptical that this benefit is worth much either - if it even exists at all.
The real benefit to metric is that it is standard across the world. So what the “convert to metric crowd” really wants to say is “it is inconvenient for me to have to keep converting from your units to mine - change your units for my benefit!” But that would feel rather dickish, so they make up a story about how changing your units is really for your benefit.
see my post[s] above
How much does 1 cubic yard of honey weigh is it’s density is 11.5lb/gal. In metric it ia 1.4 tonne to the m^3 even if I only know the weight of 1 L of honey.
Fuck trying to do that i US or imperial units
I will switch to metric for all my daily needs as soon as I find a cubic yard of honey I need to know the weight of
the only intrinsic benefit that metric has
The other benefit is that physical formulas usually work out easily
For example
1 Pa = 1 N / m2
or
1 bar= 1 N / cm2while “pounds per square inch” is nothing but insane. I couldn’t stop laughing for three days when I heard that for the first time.
Honestly, metric does have some benefits over imperial, it’s just I so often hear the one place it really doesn’t. It being a standard is useful! Rockets have exploded because of the US’s stuff being imperial, because they didn’t convert it to metric before sending it off. I don’t remember the exact story, admittedly
That probe died because of a lack of oversight. If they didn’t have a proper system verifications in place for something that obvious and simple, wtf else is NASA cowboyin’ up, Shuttle Solid Rocket Seals? Oh, yea, they did that one already. Or pure oxygen crew cabin and a door that takes minutes to open with no emergency release? Oh, yea, did that already.
If I pulled a boner like not having multiple external validations of some math I need to do, my team would laugh me out of the room when shit broke. I’d probably get a nickname for such an amateur thing.
Yeah, that was definitely a multi-leveled failure
Trying to convert your way of thinking by “making it easy.”
Honestly, it’s like a language. You have to use it and feel it through immersion. Experience is how you get people to convert.
