Ask Lemmy

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?

You've never had to add measurements with mixed units?

Ie. 1lb 2oz + 4lb 15oz?

Or heights, 5ft 10in + 6ft 5in?

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 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.

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.

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…

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 of wrenches

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.

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 ?

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.

Ooh what are the problems with base ten?