I’m always disappointed that megameter isn't a common word. People will say “one thousand kilometers” instead of just “one megameter”.

“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.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing

The only metric to imperial conversion I remember is kilometers to miles since it's pretty close to the golden ratio.

Even if you don't remember that the golden ratio is 1.6 and a bit, you can approximate it by using successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 ...

So 8 miles is about 13km (actually 12.87)

"Because we are free men, we will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters... but not all liquids, only soda, wine, and alcohol because for milk and paint we will use gallons, pints, and quarts, god willing"

"How many liters are in a gallon, sir?" "Nobody knows."

"Why not use meters and kilometers?" "We sill, soldier. But only in certain unpopular sports like track and swimming."

The only positive thing I see about imperial is that things are easily divisible by 3 and 6, but that's about it. Then again, if doing the same with metric, you're usually fine rounding to the nearest millimetre, and if that isn't accurate enough, it's probably not supposed to be done by hand anyway.

If Americans don't stop the foot thing soon I will bring back the havoc and destruction of using local measure!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_units_of_measurement

No I will not define it. I will just tell you I ran 2/3 mile and that I am prussian, now you have to look it up, convert it to meters, convert that back to your mile and then you know what I am talking about.

Btw this mile is way easier to remember because a mile is 24000 feet.

Imperial actually makes sense if there system was invented by someone who only had polyhedral dice to count with.

Not in defense of the imperial system, but if you're curious why it's so arbitrary, it's a crazy story about untangling a ton of proprietary guild measurements. The mile itself isn't quite proprietary (it was defined as 8 furlongs, and you can blame the English for ruining a perfectly good roman measurement) but they needed to make it a certain number of chains, rods, yards, and feet, plus a few other obscure measurements I forget about. Naturally that results in a stupid conversation rate (mostly vs yards and feet since it was basically a different system).

Why we still use it, dunno. I can see an argument for keeping feet and inches for things like carpentry (in the similar way I like hexadecimal in programming) but miles is not that. It's about as logical as this point as fahrenheit, which is to say it's outdated nonsense.

the only thing more aggravating than using imperial is having to listen to all the complaining about how metric is better. We get it, bro; it's out of our control at this point

Why not just keep it simple and use the 5.4 microseconds * speed of light approximation? People just love making things overly complicated.

My 2 main annoyances with the metric system:

First: The SI unit for mass is the kilogram. That's fucking stupid. A kilogram is 1000 grams, the base unit for something can't be "1000 of this other thing". Because the kilogram is the SI unit for mass, that means that a gram is, by definition, 1/1000th of a kilogram. The stupidity, it burns!

The second one isn't really an issue with the metric system, it's more when people are almost using the metric system then fuck it up, like the "Watt Hour" for measuring energy use. You know, there's already a way of measuring energy use: the "Watt Second", also known as "The Joule"

If you want to convert between imperial units, going straight from feet to miles is impractical. You'd be better off knowing the chart of survey units, and they're all small numbers so they're easy to remember.

12 inches in a foot

3 feet in a yard

22 yards in a chain

10 chains in a furlong

8 furlongs in a mile

Of course, i know this because I do 3d art in blender and refuse to set it to metric.

Just remember God giving you a single grain of sand. "One thou sand".

Not a easy to remember as 5 tomatoes.

Did someone say feet?

Fair, but I lived in Denver for 26 years. I will never forget the number of feet in a mile. 😂

All units of measure are abstract.

I like metric because it's structured around an abstract amount. Even something like Celsius is pretty abstract, because the freezing and boiling point of water changes depending on the atmospheric pressure. The measure of a second? Why is a second, 1 second long? Why is it 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day? There's other stuff based on seconds too, like Hertz, which is literally "cycles per second"

I like to think about how abstract these things are, because if we were to ever try to communicate with a truly alien race, we couldn't really use numbers, because their base numbering system would be different than ours, their symbols for numbers would be different, their entire understanding of math and how to calculate stuff could be wildly different, possibly because they understand things we do not. We couldn't even say to them to communicate on a specific frequency of EM, because that frequency is based on Hertz, which is based on seconds, which is based on ????? IDFK (neither would they). We base everything we know on the world around us, and that's entirely unique to earth. We make so many assumptions about how things are because we've only ever experienced life on this planet.

The only thing that kind of makes sense is how many days of the year there are, because it's based on solid science about our solar system. It's still unique to earth, but at least it makes sense on a larger scale. Everything else? Who the hell knows. Why is a meter as long as it is? Who defined this? Why? What abstract Earth-based thing was this based on that other societies of individuals would have no point of reference to relate to?

It's wild we've made it this far, to be honest.

Anyways, I kind of got sidetracked... I guess all I'm really trying to say is that metric makes more sense than whatever the USA is doing. Even if it's just as abstract in its conception.

Me watching a BBC TV show: "The suspect's home is five miles away."

shocked pikachu