Your Thoughts on the Johnny Harris Metric Video Surprised Me
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ต.ค. 2024
- Some people prefer living in the 18th century! It's called freedom tyvm
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My dad was a printer by trade, and owned a printshop when Australia switched to metric, including switching paper sizes. The big difference he noted was the reduction in paper waste and costs, as he went from having the option of ordering in each individual paper size and maintaining stocks, or ordering larger sheets and cutting as needed with large amounts of waste, to just buying in A0 and cutting it in half repeatedly as needed with no waste.
Switching to metric reduced his paper costs by more than half.
That is what happens, when switching to any superior system.
Why would you bother to develop something new if it actually wouldn't be better?
@@Richdragon4 Mind, the metric system was partially ideologically driven - and some parts didn't catch up, like metric time. I used to play a game that used metric time, and I had to say... that was a mistake. We should have kept that too :D
It would just be a lot nicer if we used base-12 numbers instead of base-10.
@@LuaanTi I also think that metric time is better.
Hate that conversion from seconds to hours and minutes.
SI all the way. Kelvins and kiloseconds go.
@@LuaanTi The only way we'll be using base 12 system is if we would force a new generation to use that from childhood. It would be superior, but even if you agree with that, just try getting used to it at a later age. I've worked with base 16 a lot (programmer...) and no matter how much you use it, it never gets as intuitive as the base 10 you grew up with.
@@jbird4478 Yeah, that ship has sailed, it's unlikely that will change. The mildly annoying thing is, base-12 was really common in the past (depending on culture - some places had base-15, some base-11...). We still use it for time to this day, but mostly by converting back and forth between base-12 and base-10 :D
The critical part is to stop trying to convert to base-10 and back, and just do the math in base-whatever. Which means using extra "digits", but otherwise the exact same thing. Of course, multiplication and addition tables get a bit bigger :)
Until I first googled what people meant when they said "a stick of butter", I genuinely thought they just threw those 250g blocks of butter into their food.
WAIT, HOLD ON.....
wait, they dont???
@@c.w.8200 Same in portugal and in france, 250g for 1 block of butter.
hang on what??
this explains a LOT
@@c.w.8200in Italy we have 125g, 250g, 1kg etc. I usually buy the 250
Seeing the US paper sizes horrified me...
They have different paper size system? 😐
Nvm i saw rest of the video...
Terrifying
Why does everything in the US horrify you guys? Weird…
America just has a general horror vibe tbh
The EU Standard for paper sizes is actually derived from the German system. DIN A0, up to A10. Wich, from what I heard, became a quasi recognised Standard in many places.
As a baker who’s as detail-oriented as a chemist, once I got a scale and started going by weight instead: GAME-CHANGER
As a chemist, who is trying to improve his baking skills, I do too 😀
Yes - I use a scale that goes down to grams for baking.
Mainly because I'm too lazy too clean measuring cups.
The common unit after gram (g) is milligram (mg - one thousandth of a gram ). Most household scales don't need to be that exact.
And for really small amounts - like baking powder - a teaspoon is probably better.
A scale than can weigh mg has to surrounded by glass so you can exactly measure it 🤓
As a baking enjoyer and chemistry student, weighing liquids instead of going by the markings on measuring cups is the superior way
Amateur baker here, weight is so important in bread making. How do you even do hydration level without weighting flour and water?
@@realdragon That's why american bread is AND tastes like shit...
My personal favorite for having fun with the imperial system is the question "Whats heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold" where you think the answer is that a pound is a pound, but then get told that precious metal weight technically is mesured in a different kind of pound than anything else... So the feathers is actually heavier than the gold :)
And, the answer for an ounce of feathers and an ounce of gold is the opposite, because a Troy pound and an Avoirdupois pound have a different number of their corresponding ounces.
I don’t like trick questions. When you give a Troy weight, you always indicate it, thus: “a pound of feathers or a pound (Troy) of gold.”
Well... I hate to break it to you, but that's something we ask in metric as well, it's just a kilogram instead of a pound 🙈🤷🏼♀️
@@Surdeigt There's no Troy kilogram or Troy gram in metric. In non-metric measurements, precious metals such as gold are measured in Troy ounces (31.1 grams) while almost everything else, including feathers, is measured in Avoirdupois ounces (28.35 grams). So, an ounce of gold is heavier than an ounce of feathers. But, a Troy pound is 12 Troy ounces (373.2 grams) and an Avoirdupois pound is 16 Avoirdupois ounces (453.6 grams). So, a pound of feathers is heavier than a pound of gold.
D-OH 🤣
Fun fact about the A0 system of paper, the ratio of the paper is precisely chosen so halving it will cause it to retain the ratio, so every single piece of A[] paper will look exactly the same, just sized up or down
Edit: this also makes it easier to print, since if you’re making something A4 sized you don’t need to stretch or cut anything if you want it A3 or A0
The ratio of the two sides is the square root of 2
@@Bakismannen_swedenyes, that's the consequence of the aforementioned desire to keep sizes "halvable"
Math is beautiful sometimes
I also believe it's designed so that the area of an ISO A0 sheet of paper has an area of exactly one square metre. It gets even more interesting once you get to the B and C series (which share the same aspect ratio but are designed to cover other useful sizes).
But urgh, the pain of having to print stuff designed for US paper sizes on ISO paper.
I never knew before today that the Ax paper sizing system was based on consistent ratios between sizes. Suddenly I no longer prefer American sizing and want us to switch to A-sizing. That would make resizing an image for different print jobs sooooooo much easier. (posters to flyers, e.g.)
The best feature of the A paper system is that because every size is twice the size of the preceding size, if you fold an A3 in half, you get an A4. Makes designing pamphlets very easy.
As someone who's driven manual for 20 years, you choose what gear you're in by the sound of your engine, not by the speed you're trying to go. Different cars have different power bands, whether you're going up or down a hill is a factor, etc etc. Associating gear with speed is possibly useful for newer drivers, I suppose.
Rev range, task at hand, lots of different things determine which gear you should be in, but yeah, I judge it by how the engine sounds too.
Manual driver my whole driving life. (My father said that any monkey can drive an automatic. ) I also taught my daughters to drive by sound.
The mph argument is one only an ignorant American could make. Ignorant in the decimal system and ignorant in cars. But hear him bitching when the car needs to go to the shop, because he shifted by that rule.
Driving by sound is dumb on most modern, fully encapsulated engines. Do you really believe to be smarter than the engineers that designed the engine? I don't think so. I trust my cars electronics to tell me what gear would be best for the current speed and motor load.
@@wernerviehhauser94 yes, electronic mostly more efficient and precise, but not always can read your mind. Driving DCT i frequently switch to manual control on overtakes and in hilly regions. Also, i don't fully trust it to minimize wear on switching to 1st.
Often I miss driving company's beat-up manual cars.
Here in Australia, when I was 23, we converted to Metric in 1973. Within 2 years pretty well everything was fully converted and with minimal fuss and ado. It is by far a very accurate measuring system. 👍🤗
You didn't have Internet back then. Would take longer and would be far more fuzz if social media existed
@@jur4x mate it rlly wouldnt, Ireland fully switched in 2005 and the internet was really big by then
We also rationalised imperial measurements into metric for machines, timber, construction fasteners etc so a "2x4" in the old system was now 50x100 (but actually 51x101 so the machines that created the products didn't have to change all at the same time). 13mm is still a common size in garden hose as it is close to 1/2 inch. I am much happier with metric in general as it is a base 10 system right through and not some arbitrary set of ratios that is different across types of units.
@@jur4xWhat kind of stupid argument is that? The whole world already uses the metric system (also on the Internet), except OF COURSE the "almighty United States” and two (at best) developing countries...
@@bemml😂😂😂 now only one country plus USA.
As a British woman of the older generation, I have got used to the metric system. One thing that makes me smile is when I buy fabric I ask for the amount of meters I need and I quite often get asked if I want it 26 inches wide or 38 inches wide. Quite old fashioned 😂
makes me laugh too, then I look them dead in the eye and say, what's that in metric?
the circumference of human adult or child ? or just weaving loom / transportation requirements
@@silkvelvet2616 just use your thumbs.
@@poppers7317what's the significance of a thumb if people have them in different sizes?
@@endermanowa tell this that person who invented the inch.
I'm surprised nobody commented with my favourite quote about Metric vs Imperial:
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 Celsius (or Kelvin same difference), which is one percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point.
Try using the imperial system to answer the question "How much energy does it take to boil a room temperature gallon of water?"
Let's see...a gallon is about 8 pounds of water, so each degree is going to "cost" you 8 BTUs. If your room temperature is around 72 degrees Fahrenheit, you're going to have to heat it up by 140 degrees Fahrenheit. 140x8=1120, so it's going to cost you 1120 BTUs plus the latent heat of vaporization (970 BTU/lb, or 7760 BTU for the whole thing). But you're not going to evaporate the whole gallon of water; you're just going to get it to the point where it's in the process of evaporating, so you're only going to use some unknown part of the latent heat of vaporization.
p.s. When doing this sort of calculation in metric units, the latent heat of vaporization, of which you're only going to add part if you're boiling something, is 540 calories per gram.
@@philipmcniel4908 "a gallon is about 8 pounds of water" - Already a problem.
An Imperial gallon is 10 pounds of water.
A US Customary Units gallon is 8 pounds of water.
Hey, the fact that _they_ don't use a power of 2 in a base-2 system doesn't mean there's something wrong with _our_ system :)@@polyvg
Just to be fair, I’m going to make that quote a little more accurate.
In metric, one milliliter of (liquid) water (at or below 3.98 degrees Celsius) occupies (approximately) one cubic centimeter, weighs (approximately) one gram, and requires one calorie of energy (not to be confused with the calorie, which has an identical name but is equivalent to 1,000 of the small calories) to heat up by one degree Celsius (only if the water is going from 0 degrees (but still liquid, not frozen) to 1 degree Celsius) which is one percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point (in terms of the temperature (aka movement of the particles), not in terms of energy)
Yes, it’s still much simpler than the imperial system for most things, and the majority of these issues are minor enough that you’d never have to account for them in your daily life, but I think it’s fair we don’t give the system too much credit.
@@apocalypsemvp 1 militer is _exactly_ equal to 1 cubic centimeter. They're both units of volume (you could say they're two names for the same unit)
edit: Also, I've only ever seen calories used on food packaging. For physics, you'd typically use joules [J]
Speaking of European paper sizes, you might not have noticed that an A0 sheet has a area that works out to exactly 1sqm. So an A0 sheet of 80gsm paper weighs..
80 grams.
An A1 sheet weighs half that (40g) and if you keep going you find that an A4 sheet is 5g.
This makes it very easy to estimate the weight of a stack of paper provided you know the number of sheets. Even if someone in the office bought 120gsm paper by accident.
It cane up a lot in my old engineering firm where we didn't have a dedicated mail department to weigh items and calculate postage. Each engineer would issue their own packages of documents and calculate postage this way.
Hell I used DIN paper all my life and I didn't know that. 😅
Edit: that the "number" on the paper is g/m^2. I always thought it was just an arbitrary number.
There's more to it than that. If you want to know the area of a european piece of paper, its 1/(2^) square metres.
Also, the ratio of the sides are 1: sqrt(2). It means if you fold a piece of paper in half you should get the next smaller size. So if you fold a sheet of A4 then the footprint will be A5.
@@azog23 or roughly a ratio of 1:1.4
@@keit99g/m^2 suddenly make so much sense when you know A0 paper has the surface area of 1m^2
@@harrytsang1501 well I knew A0 is 1m^2 but didn't know that the weight was g/m^2
As a french that has been using Celsius scale all my life, we generally bese ourselves of the maximum temperature of the day to describe it.
Typically, if you say "it's gonna be in the 70s today", it can be anywhere from the 21 to 26, while these temperatures are widely different. When we do here is that we take the highest temperature of the day (or the lowest if we're in winter) and we say "it's gonna be X temperature today". Because any warmer than the lowest in winter or any higher than the highest is irrelevant for us to know what temperature we'll have to deal with during the day.
Typically, in southern France 2 weeks ago we had a pretty intense heat wave. We didn't say "it's gonna be in the high 30s up into the 40s" we said "tommorow it's gonna be 41C". Because that's the main information that's important, we don't need to know that there is lower temperatures somewhere during the day.
And that works for any day of the year. "tommorow is going to be 27" or "oh we have -10 on tuesday"
In my opinion it's just another way of describing temperatures, but it's just as fast and easy to say
Some places will report the high and low temperatures of the day, along with other data, like weather behaviour ranging from SNOW to SUN, or even combinations like...
"Tomorrow should be a sunny calm morning with low humidity. That [humidity] will climb quickly from 10am with a high of 40 [degrees Celsius] around 1pm, and lightning storms are expected to blanket the city and northern suburbs by evening, the low pressure zone heading north east to the Pacific [Ocean]. Watch out for flash floods on the road home from work and school tomorrow folks, now to Tom Knickerbocker with a heartwarming story to finish off the news hour and keep you coming back for more narrowing of your field of view/frame of reference...FOREVER!!!"
Or something like that.
Same here in Korea!
@@subwayfacemelt4325
Well, yes. Watching the weather report on television or on your phone will look different than an everyday casual conversation.
I had no idea that american sticks of butter arw so freaking small. I'd read an american recipe (with no metric versikn available) and it would cal for 6 sticks of butter and I'm reacting in horror at the thought of 1.5kg of butter in that recipe?!? For FOUR PEOPLE?!?
I always figured that the sticks would be a similar amount to 250g, only in those weird ounces.
thats a horror for me, but we each time buy ammount of butter we need in same day.
But you can get giant buckets of peanut butter … so, who cares ? /s 😂
The fact that that commenter saw no issue in needing pre-measured portions of butter to be able to cook was the kinda thing that made me pause and go for a smoke. I cant with some people.
But we get 4 sticks in a pack. Unless we buy the good stuff like Kerry Gold.
Something that confuses me is when some people insist metric is inferior, but then they use decimals with imperial based measures - 2.5 ounces rather than 2 1/2 ounces.
On the Celsius vs Fahrenheit, I have lived in both the US and now Canada (and have family in both so still use both to some degree). I find freezing being zero to be very useful as it means everything below zero is marked with the word "negative" or "minus", and thus stands out more in a sentence. Sure you can just always check if a number is below 32 in Fahrenheit, but immediate recognition in Celsius is just nice. Especially as a lot of things care about freezing: clothing, weather, driving, plants, food, and a lot of random products. Also it means the size of the negative numbers can be interpreted as how freezing cold it is. Finally it means single digits numbers, especially small ones, are close to the freezing point which is when you have to worry about things thawing and re-freezing, and thus ice, which is important when driving or skiing. So again just makes it easier, as noticing a single digit number is pretty obvious, and how small the is number let's you know roughly how likely new ice has formed (e.g. -1 or 1: there is very likely to be new ice, -9 or 9: very unlikely there is new ice).
Your argument in the previous video that 0 to 100 being a good range for the weather humans regularly experience is never how I personally viewed it. A lot of places regularly get outside that range (where I lived in the US it would go above 100 F for multiple days every summer, and that's in northern California). And even though the two places I've lived in Canada stayed in that temperature band (except some days in the middle of winter in Alberta) I still found Celsius to be more useful for the reason mentioned above (even living in southwestern BC where it rarely gets below freezing).
As for being able to say "it's in the 70's", I do miss that. There was something nice about using a round number with no qualifier. Though I have replaced that with low/mid/high. As in, low 20's feels like room temperature; mid 20's is a nice warm day; and high 20's is when it starts being uncomfortable living in a building with no AC. While this system is terrible at translating to the old Fahrenheit system I used to use, I find it better matches how I categorize the temperatures in my head.
Though I find most people in Canada just say the actual temperature (where Americans are more likely to give a range). Weirdly, I think this is because Celsius is less accurate than Fahrenheit. There is a study that shows that people are able to perceive a 1 C degree difference in ambient temperature (note if touching two objects people can perceive temperature differences of about a tenth a degree Celsius). So by coincidence, Celsius is at the scale humans can perceive ambient temperatures. In Celsius, I can easily tell 20 vs 22 and have an idea of what 20, 21, and 22 all feel like. Whereas with Fahrenheit, I don't think of 70 and 71 as feeling different.
The study mentioned: "An investigation on humans’ sensitivity to environmental
temperature" by Laura Battistel et al.
@pengoyo6943 I was one of those who argued that 0-100 feels like a natural number range, since we count in base 10 and use the range for all sorts of things. But I was thinking of and referring to 0-100 C and not 100 F. On the celsius scale we don't have to think of weather over 100.
Well, you can argue that the F scale is finer, but that all goes out of the window when you use digit's behind the comma (yes, here in Europe we use 21,5 degrees in stead of 21.5 degrees). For me it's natural to use fractional temperatures, and so have a finer scale.
@@jclosed2516 Completely agree. Just was at the public pool. There air temp was denoted as 17°C, while water temp was shown as 24,6°C. Why? Because (perceived) air temp changes so quickly (one single cloud is enough) that pretending to know it to even the degree (celsius or Fahrenheit doesn't matter) is preposterous. Meanwhile knowing the water temperature to 0,1°C (or roughly 0.2F) IS valuable... and guess what, 0,1°C is more precise than 1F.
Just for the sake of the reading audience, the only portion of BC that rarely reaches freezing is the Lower Mainland (Vancouver Area), Sunshine Coast, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, basically Southern communities near the ocean. If you travel anywhere else in the vast majority of the Province, wear a Winter coat, snow boots and have Winter tires in Winter, it definitely gets below zero Celcius.
@charleshayes2528 I agree if 0-100 worked it would be a nice scale for the reasons you mentioned. I just don't find Fahrenheit or Celsius are a 0-100 scale for what humans can reasonably experience.
@jclosed2516 Yeah I agree that you can add decimals if needed, though personally I don't find the need very often. Though the ability to add decimals is also possible in Fahrenheit, though for the reason I mentioned in my earlier post, that's often overkill. Though interesting coincidence again that 0.1 is about the maximum threshold of human temperature perception which nicely lines up with using decimals in Celsius but not Fahrenheit.
@AleaumeAnders Yeah, I usually have a cloudy/shade vs sunny idea of what each daily temperature in Celsius means as they are quite different. But in Fahrenheit I definitely mentally group together a range of numbers as the same in terms of my expectations for even just clear sky sunny days.
@clarissathompson Yes, not all of BC has the same climate. I am just referring to where I live. To add to your point, some parts of BC are even colder than where I lived in Alberta.
Australia switched to metric in 1971. It makes everything so much easier - all the measurements are consistent and interconnected. Logical and intuitive. There was some resistance from the older generations at the time.
The USA can really learn from Australia in many things. Like how to get rid of shootings.
Among nations with British heritage, Australia and New Zealand seem to be the most sensible. As can be seen from Australia's gun regulations.
The UK and the US, on the other hand, cling to their outdated traditions.
that's the point. It's not like imperial has any advantages. As a lazy person, with no great math skills, metric is SOOO much easier.
With the temperature is probably just what you're used to. Unless you deal with Kelvin (like in science) than Celsius is the way easier option, as it runs parallel.
I have used both systems interchangeably for basically my whole life and I don't see how the metric system "makes everything so much easier", and how are the measurements in the imperial system not interconnected? They all match up pretty well last time I checked, 12 inches still makes a foot.
@@willb.139 You haven't seen any of the videos?, They explain WHY imperial su**s so much...
I worked in an exhibition stand design company near London in the late 1970s. We started going metric in 1978 and we had an A4 sheet (which I still have) showing all the measurements in imperial and metric. One day our old tea lady (yes a lady who made us tea at 10.30am and 3.30pm) was pushing her tea trolley through the design studio and our design manager said “Margaret, what’s two inches in metric?” Without slowing down she said “51 millimetres.” We had to stop her and ask how she knew it (and she was very accurate 2” = 50.8mm. She told us she converted knitting patterns she bought from Europe into Imperial. We said right then if Margaret can do it then we can do it!! I’ve used metric only since the mid 1980s - it took a while to become fully conversant with metres. My daughter is 28 and she is an interior designer working for a French company based in London. Everything is 100% metric and she’d struggle to give me a dimension in inches! When I but a 5m or 10m tape measure I have to make sure it’s got mm on both edges of the tape - I have no use for inches!! I have used Kg for my weight for about 25 years and metres for my height. I have no idea what I weigh in “stones”. The only imperial unit I still use is when I’m buying footwear as the unit of measurement (in both the UK and the US) is the barleycorn! One barleycorn is a 1/3” or 8.47mm. US footwear has a different starting point than the UK and is one barleycorn different!
Wait… shoe sizes are measured in barleycorns?!
An extra point about the A series of paper sizes: the series is based on A0, which has an area of 1 square metre, but the sides are in the ratio 1 to the square root of 2. (The ratio of the sides is a consequence of A1 being A0 cut in half, and so on).
And if you switch the A for a C you have the correct envelope for your letter. A4 fits in C4, A3 in C3 etc.
it's the other way around. The 1 to sqrt(2) ratio was chosen by design. It's not a consequence of an A1 being half an A0. The A1 is half of an A0 in the way that it is, because the A0 has these ratios.
As a fun side effect, an A4 sheet of 80gram paper weighs 5 grams.
@@fermitupoupon1754 Semantic counter argument: The design choice was that A1 is half of A0, so from there the ratio follows. Another interesting result is that you sometimes see A-1, which is twice A0.
@@fermitupoupon1754
No, the design decision was that A1 should be the same shape as A0, and half the area. If you take these design parameters, the ratio of the sides must be 1 to the square root of 2. This is easy to prove mathematically.
@@fermitupoupon1754 that is a completely meaningless distinction. A(n+1) is half of A(n) while preserving ratio if and only if the ratio is 1 to sqrt(2). They are the same thing, they are mathematically coupled. However, it is much more believable that A0 was invented because the geometric property is desirable, and that can only happen with 1:sqrt(2). As opposed to someone just choosing 1:sqrt(2) because it looks nice and it just so happening to give you ratio preservation after doubling.
I did two years of engineering school before I dropped out to join the Army. In physics, chemistry, calculus, and the Army for that matter, most things use the metric system. I have to say the one small issue I have is with temperature and distance because I don't have an intuitive feel for what 25 degrees Celsius or 400 kilometers is. That would disappear after we used it for a short while. Not a hill to die on in my opinion.
To be fair, as a European I don't really have an 'intuitive feel' for what 400 kilometers is either. I know how long it takes to drive, sure, and I could probably make an educated guess about where on the map I'd end up, but it's an order of magnitude above what we can realistically visualise.
As you said, distance and temperature would come with practice. I just posted to Evan that I wouldn't understand him if he was saying today will be in the 70s, it means nothing to me. Now if someone were to say 23C, I'd be right, nice day, a little on the cool side, take a light jacket for when the sea breeze comes in.
@@stevek606 Where I live in West Texas, how many hours something is away is usually a more useful measure than the actual distance.
@@utha2665 My point exactly.
for temperature i've heard a good memnonic:
30 is hot
20 is nice
10 is cool
0 is ice
One thing I missed in the original video was how unintuitive length measurement in imperial is, 1 mile=1760 yards (÷1760), 1760 yards=5280 feet (÷3), 5280 feet=63360 inch (÷12). Every conversion WITHIN the system is fastly different which I guess is the reason why Americans use "things" like football fields to describe distance.
You're trying metric prefix conversions with imperial measures. It's no wonder you're confused. The only time I worried about inches in a mile was with the old 1 inch mile maps - they had a scale of 1:63360. I never thought about feet in a mile. I mean, would you _really_ measure the distance between, say, London and Brighton in millimetres or centimetres?
In Imperial your base unit is the barley corn. Laid end to end three barley corns was 1 inch.
However, barley corns were rarely used (but still _are_ with UK shoe sizes - each size has a difference of a barley corn (1/3 in) in length between them). Thus the base unit tends to be the inch.
When you get 12 of them together you start using duodeca-inches, otherwise known as a foot. That measure tends to be used until you get a lot of them to measure distances when switching to tri-feet, otherwise known as yards, takes over (except in the US for some reason - at speed, having distances in a larger sub unit makes sense: yards go past at one third the rate of feet; also, yards are of a similar length to metres).
There are larger distances but they have fallen out of favour, except for 22 yards, a chain, is the distance between the wickets in cricket, and 220 yards which is used in horse racing: 220 yards is 1 furlong.
@cigmorfil4101 Lots of people do need to convert between large and small units of length though. For example, say you're building a bridge that's three miles long and you figure (random numbers) you need 2 bolts per inch for the railing.
This is a significant disadvantage, especially next to the US customary units advantages which are... nothing really.
@@chrisbeer5685 so you randomly work out 2 × 63360 × 3. Not a hard problem.
There is a video on TH-cam where someone for an example has a bridge a mile long, needs 2 bolts to hold the railing posts every 6 ft. He calculates it as
2 × 63360 in/mile × 1 mile ÷ (12 in/ft × 2 ft/bolt)
and complains about the silky conversions and ridiculous numbers. Perhaps in metric where the bridge is 1.609344 km long and you need 2 bolts every 1.8288 m would be easier? (The answer is an exact number).
In metric it's 2 × 1.608344 km ÷ 1.8288 bolts/m.
In imperial it's 2 × 1 mile ÷ 6 ft/bolt.
Which would you rather work out?
Using more sensible conversions to similar units the imperial can be calculated in your head - I challenge you to do the metric calculation in your head.
The imperial in you head is:
2 × 1 mile + 6 ft/bolt
= 2 × 1760 yard/mile × 1 mile ÷ (6 ft/bolt ÷ 2 ft/yard)
= 2 × 1760 yard ÷ 2 yard/bolt
= 1760 bolts.
For the metric you get 2 × 1609344 mm ÷ 1822.8 mm/bolt = where's my slide rule.
@@cigmorfil4101 In other words, forget about converting, it's too hard in imperial. In a metric country, everyone converts km to meters daily and on the fly, because road signs say 200m instead of 1/5 km or whatever crazy fraction that you can't visualize in smaller units. It's of course just as easy to convert further down to cm or mm.
When someone says "imperial system", I ask "what system?", 1 gallon being ~0.1336805556 cubic feet is not a system at all.
as an american, i have never in my life heard someone describe distance in football fields, unless actually talking about area, as in, that factory is about 4 football fields, to give a general account of the scale of something, and then more likely x number of stadiums
The Celsius argument still makes a lot more sense IMO, the simple fact that fahrenheit uses an "incomplete" number like 96 or 90 as its base point makes it unnecessarily complicated. For a child learning how measuring system works, there's nothing easier to visualize than 0º = ice and 100º vapor, as water is something you actually can visualize it's changes dues to temperature on a day to day basis, unlike most of the other things.
Also important for drivers in cold reasons. The difference between 0C and 1C is whether or not black ice can be expected on the roads
Fahrenheit tried to make a human scale... 😂😂😂😂 used for zero the temperature when the salt water frozen (everyone is familiar with the ocean frozen) and for the 100 he used his normal body temperature... he has a fever 😂😂😂😂.
Metric paper sizes: A0 is a rectangle, but it has an area of 1sqm. A1 is a half sqm, A2 is a quarter sqm, etc. When you design something, you can also print it on different sizes of paper without changing its shape. Or alternatively print two on one page It's quite a neat system!
Also, if you need an in-between size, there's the B series that works the same, but is slightly smaller. B4 is halfway through A4 and A5.
@@vytah Other way around. B-series is larger than A-series. C-series is inbetween. B4 > C4 > A4. C-series is used for envelopes where you don't want to fold the contents.
And if you have A4 and want A5... you can just cut it in half. Makes a _lot_ of designing a _lot_ simpler, overall.
The concept is cool, but starting from 1m² leaves you with all irrational side lengths even from the beginning.
Forgive my quick mental math if this is off, but that would make A0 1/2^(¼)m × 2^(¼)m? And A4 is 1/(4*2^(¼))m × 2^(¼)/4m?
I just feel a rational n for the initial n×2^(½)n dimensions would be more reasonable than working backwards from a desired area.
No wonder you never refer directly to the dimensions, that would be a nightmare.
The area is 1m2 divided by 2 to the power of the A number.
A metric ton (tonne) is 1000kg, which is 2204.6 lbs, so there are at least three different values for "a ton".
That’s surprisingly close to the British ton
Unfortunately
I recently learned that "ton" is also used in air conditioners to measure their power output. At first I thought that the guy in the video wanted to make a joke! Or convert the 12 000 btu (another stupid unit) to a more sensible basis. You know, so they can say "This one has a ton of capacity, but this one has four tons of capacity". But no, turns out, ton is a unit of power equivalent to 12 000 btu, or the energy required to melt one imperial ton of ice per day! This is absolutely deranged, but I AM NOT JOKING!
@@turun_ambartanen That's so cool (hah)
There are way too many tonnes. I saw a video with I believe it was 12-13 different base ones. Note that there were different tonnes of dry weight, wet weight, powder weight and fabric for instance. And then there was a different naval set to some of the land transport measurement system. And several different countries/languages...
Virtually all rulers and tape measures sold here in the UK have both metric and imperial measurements marked on them, so you can choose which to use.
Same in US
Probably made in China for the US market ... the UK and US both speak english...chinese sales logic 😆
@@ShenandoahShelty Nowadays, almost certainly. In the past, I am not so sure. The old wooden rulers we used in the 1950s and 60s, pre-decimalisation and pre-EEC/EU were almost certainly British made and had both units.
I'm in a fully metric country but you still see inches and ounces and such on many mass-produced tape measures and measuring cups.
@@charleshayes2528 I remember those, at some point didn't they have a metallic edge? The old days. When I was in 4th grade we left pencils behind and moved to fountain pens... my adult niece has never seen a fountain pen, and her child is no longer required to learn cursive. Don't know whether that's good or bad? I forgot we're the only country that uses ball-point or bic instead of biro
Imperial is the epitome of the expression "more is not always better".
1:10 "32" sounds like a far more arbitrary number than "0" when it comes to the freezing point of water. Celsius' "0" feels more intuitive, even elegant.
The Fahrenheit scale wasn't designed around the freezing and boiling temperatures of water at sea level. I'm sure if you're concerned only with the freezing or boiling temperature of water, that's a good way to judge it. If you want to know how the air temperature is going to feel to your body and how much clothes you should wear EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE, you might want to consider using Fahrenheit, where 50 is approximately the average environmental temperature of inhabited places on the Earth, 100 is around the hottest, and 0 is about the coldest. Interestingly, the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales meet at -40 degress.
@@firstenforemost You can judge how much you have to wear based on the Celsius scale just the same without ANY ISSUES: 30+ is very hot, ~15 is mild and
@@firstenforemost I'm sorry, but only an US person would think that. Even your scientists are using metric and celcius. Kelvin is the same scale as C, it just starts at zero (-273,15C or -459,67F), because no temprature is realy in the negative, thats why we have the Kalvin scale.
@@firstenforemostyou say numbers that only mean something for people using the system. Same could be said about Celsius.
You have spotted the fundamental flaw of Fahrenheit. The scale isnt based on anything rational.
That chart of US paper sizes broke me. I was aware of the approximate sizes of some of them -- mainly letter and legal -- from having worked with North American PDFs. But I had no idea that there were so many official US sizes, and I certainly didn't realise that there was absolutely no numerical relationship between most of them nor anything close to a standardised aspect ratio. It's incredible. It's like something Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams would have come up with as an example of unnecessary complexity. Even the ANSI standards has two different aspect ratios. Anyone who uses these on a daily basis and knows more than a couple of them without looking them up deserves some sort of medal. I just keep staring at that chart with a combination of bewilderment and admiration.
The sizing of American beds....
I think that chart may have more than just the US ones in there. mostly just that reasonably divided block on the left of the chart equivalent to the whole metric chart, and legal come up... though I think the old news press was in demi. I think the frame shop had a chart some 20 years ago, but customers are not trusted with it and everything is to be measured by staff.
American here: everyone knows the letter size (8.5" x 11") and the standard index card (3" x 5" -- although most people call them "three by five cards" so it's easy) and a lot, but not everyone, knows the legal size (8.5" x 14"). No one knows any other sizes unless they work in some very specific industries. I do personally like the elegance of the A system, but the size is weird. A quick search later: 210mm x 297mm, why not 200 x 300 (or 210 x 300)? Edit: apparently that weird number is to make A0 as close to 1 square meter as possible while keeping a roughly 2/3 aspect ratio.
@@evilbob840the 1 square meter thing adds some sense to a system I've used my entire life without having a clue where the sizing comes from. Thank you for looking that up and sharing!
The only one most people use in a given year is letter, second to that is legal (used for certain forms in the U.S. and Canada) and then third is one called Ledger, and it's 17×11, which is just two Letter pages side-by-side.
Americans are stubborn. We’d rather stick to the convoluted system we know over one that makes conversions super simple.
Probably the same muppets still thinking the US is the best and most free country in the whole world ;)
Stubborn or stupid?
@@ankra12Yes.
Considering metric is used in food, engineering etc, (NASA uses metric as oft quoted) in the US, it really is that falsely placed patriotism that prevents an official conversion.
Stubborn…? Or cruelly uneducated?
11:57 This reminds me of when Finland moved from the Finnish markka to euro. Shops and services were giving out "euro calculators" that had buttons for euro-markka and markka-euro conversions. I'm sure a lot of the other euro countries did something similar.
Can confirm, pretty much every country started giving away two-ways converters between the local currency and euros.
Which makes me wonder if anyone collected *those* as we definitely tried to acquire euro coins from every country in the original set.
The UK did this when they moved from pounds-shillings-pence to decimal in 1971, too. My mum still has one that was a red plastic mechanical thingy.
not here in Germany as it was 2 Mark for 1 Euro, or as cynical people put it (due to inflation caused by the Euro) 1 Mark turned into 1 Eur.
The butter rant is 100% real. Like, I have to keep multiple sticks of butter in the fridge: one for everyday use and one for baking.
Oh you poor thing... Seriously how is this a complaint? Do people even use the same kind of butter for baking and for frying? 😂
@@microcolonel Depends if you wanna follow a recipe of not, generally you don't use salted butter in baking, most baking recipes say to use unsalted butter. I just use salted butter then just don't add as much salt as the recipes says to make up for it unless the recipes doesn't have any salt in it
I use stick butter for baking /cooking and tub butter for spreading.
@@sherrybrown5295 does real butter come in tubs? In my country it only comes in rectangular bricks.
Oops, sorry, we do have bougie butter made by a local cheese shop which is a large column in the shop that they scoop off of and put in a tub. Their truffle butter is nice.
To add to the A* paper sizes: A0 is exactly one square meter in size. So when you have paper which weighs 90g per m², thats exacty how much 16 sheets of A4 weigh.
Exactly, the metric system is all about making conversions simple.
And than there are also the other 3 Paper formats B C and D, where B4 is exactly A4 with the normed printing Border, so if you print an A4 Picture on a B4 Paper and cut of the white Border, you are left with a perfectly A4 siced Picture printed to the edge of the Paper. the C is a bit bigger than A, so an Envalope for A4 Papers is siced in C4 so the A4 can nicely Fit inside. For Bigger things like Folders you migth use B, so you have more room. and the D series is not really used anymore.
@@Bumi-90 And B-series is based on B0 being 1 by sqrt(2) metres, and the C-series being the geometric mean of the A- and B-series sheets with the same number, so C4 is the geometric mean of A4 and B4.
@@Bumi-90
I've just printed an A5 photo on A4 paper; I could cut off the white borders to leave it printed to the edge of A5...
B4 (I'm assuming Pi, the student magazine of UCL was printed in the 1980s on B4 and folded to B5) leaves rather odd borders when A4 is centred on it: approx 24mm either side and 33mm top and bottom. Odd when compared to the printers I use which require a 3mm oversize border all round to allow for trimming (eg A5 needs to be approx 216mm × 155mm).
@@rogerwilco2
Except to do so it requires A4 to be 297.301778... mm by 210.224103... mm - both the dimensions are irrational, unlike US paper which is exactly 11 inches (279.4mm) by 8 inches (203.2mm).
As a maths teacher in the UK I think one of the other legacies of Imperial is the overfocus our curriculum still has on fractions. Knowing 3/8 is 6/16ths or 12/32nds was vital when you did your DIY in inches, now its just clogging up every November of my life
I don't think that is really an issue. Like think of it like Pie or Pizza. Mary cuts her pie into 16 pieces, John age 6/16ths of the pie what % of the pie did he eat? Knowing how to simplify fractions is an important step in showing your work EDIT:To show my work
6/16-> 3/8->0.375->37.5%
There may be a need to reduce emphasis on fractions, but I don't think imperial conversions would account for all that. You'd need to know it, but who other than a carpenter or plumber would perform a calculation by hand. My niece teaches HS math/physics in the US, I'll ask her about that.
@@clarehidalgo Everyone needs to learn fractions of various kinds, while the imperial types need to REALLY LEARN specific fractions of the binary kind, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 etc, which is what the OP was talking about.
Why would that lesson take more than ten minutes, total?
@@JohnDlugosz I remember it taking a lot longer than that. I'm thinking we used fractions as a stepping stone to decimals.
The YT recommendations actually works! Because I never watched videos from this channel before but had some from Jonny's. And yes, the two metric vids got fed to me. Enjoyed every minute ☺
Canada technically uses metric, but because so many products we used are shared with the US, we really have no choice but to know US measurements as well, especially when doing construction. We don't buy lumber in metric measurements, so a lot of measuring tapes are still only in feet and inches. The most confusing aspect is when you're working with old things, because Canada didn't switch from US to metric, we switched from imperial to metric. So when we see any measurement in gallons or quarts, we have to figure out if what we're working with is really old and Canadian or British, or only somewhat old and American.
I'm told that metrification in Canada was halted partway by a Conservative government, so some things are in metric while others are still US customary or British Imperial.
@@MMuraseofSandvich There was resistance for sure, but I don't know if full metrification would have been possible either way. As long as we get consumer products from the US or designed for the US, we're going to be stuck with tools and parts that are designed using US units. Mechanics will always be stuck with two sets of wrenches, because you might need either one depending on the origin of the product you're working on.
@@MMuraseofSandvich Technically it wasn't halted they just stopped pushing it, but everything officially switched over. Everything is officially metric but in everyday usage a lot of people still use imperial for certain things especially if there is some connection with the US. It is most apparent in things like grocery stores where most things are just relabeled American products meaning that you don't see a lot of round numbers, butter for instance is most often sold here in 454g blocks.
I like how Evan placed the stress in the wrong place in nigh on every part of the old UK coinage list, when he should have got a lot more of the pronunciations right just by sheer chance. Magnificent... and an almost unholy experience!
Just got to that part, was thinking surely he couldn't get it that wrong...
Oh gods-
Few years ago I read an american book, with something about potatoes, measured in bushels. I had no idea how much is a bushel of potatoes so I went to google and almost went catatonic. Because a bushel started as a unit of capacity, but then it somehow morphed into a unit of weight. And is different for everything you measure in bushels. I swear my brain started to melt…
Hi, I might be wrong, but a bushel was always a unit of volume. The transition to weight is only because a volume of something must also have mass and if the item is fairly uniform, the same volume will have approximately the same weight. Conversely, the weight indicates the size of the container you need to hold that weight. Dry goods, like oats, are obviously fairly uniform and so a bushel of oats would usually weigh the same. Eventually the weight of a bushel for specific goods became settled. About a century ago, nails were sold in kegs, strictly a measure of volume, but equalling a specific weight - of 100 lbs or 45 .35 kg and presumably containing approximately the same number in each keg. Personally, I wouldn't want to buy potatoes or large items by volume, unless there was a standard weight to that volume. That is because very large and uneven potatoes would leave more empty space, whereas smaller items would pack together more densely.
Bushels are Volumetric. Those are standard bushels used for selling crops. Its because ag equipment, trailers, and grain storage are all measured in Volume it makes it easier for the farmer to get an estimate of how much money he is getting. but at the end of the day they are really just selling it by weight. Most European Farmers have an approximant amount of liters are in a metric ton for the crops they sell for doing the same type of math. If you are not a farmer you don't need to know standardized bushels. We buy a large amount of commodities by weight. Especially produce
Adding to the confusion is that Canada and the US use a different size of bushel. Canada uses the Avery (imperial) bushel which is 36.37 liters while the US uses the Winchester bushel which is 35.24 liters.
I learned about bushels when I read the Battle Mage Farmer Series by Seth Ring and had a similar reaction.
Most Americans have no idea what a bushel is, it's a unit that persists among farmers and fruit growers (along with the peck, which is even more obscure.)
I deal with temperature ranges in Celsius (± a couple of degrees)
O° - freezing
10° - cold
20° - cool
30° - warm
40° - hot
50° - [censored]
Was going to post something similar but to me 20 is warm, 29+ hot, 40 starts to be unbearable
@@bladebk5537 Yeah It depends on where you live, I am an Australian if that helps.
Oh my god as a print and graphic designer in Canada, I bust out laughing when you showed the US' paper system HAHAHA I would cry. I would also quit immediately lmao I'm so glad I'm in Canada using A4 system. That can't be real.
Our default sizes are letter and legal.
@@adorabell4253 Yes, for most people default is fine! It's just that in print, we work with companies who want a variety of sizes for a variety of reasons so a standard system that makes sense helps with communication a lot when working with a whole team of people.
I just went to the Canadian website for Staples office supply. All the paper was 8.5" x 11".
I would love my province to get on aboard the A4 train but here I am explaining to new students that we aren't there yet but letter is kinda the same.
And trying to convince the printer that was setup in letter size that it does not have the wrong paper size. The printer is very stubborn.
Do you use A4 in Canada??? Here in Mexico we still use letter and legal sizes even though we're fully metric for anything else, and I can't help but wonder why???
Also since we don't use inches, I would have no idea what a 8.5" x 11" paper is....
I once read that here in Canada, we're still using Letter/Legal paper size only because almost all the commercial/industrial machinery/equipment related to paper came from the US, as importing those from overseas would have been prohibitively expensive. Because those are long-time buys, they are rarely replaced. Compared to Consumer stuff (printer/copy machine) that could support both with simple modification and aren't expected to last much more than 5 years either.
It's the same with construction materials and tools. Most trade is with companies from the USA so in Canada we are stuck using their measurements with any products that cross the border.
Likely because most of our trade around this is also with the US
Is that why our canadian made copiers handle both french and english....Sorry. I couldn't resist
Canada is also painfully behind curve on a lot because of decades of political infighting and fringe nationalism. Pair those with close US ties and we've pretty much stonewalled ourselves.
@@themothman3726 Our economies are just too intertwined. I do wish they'd do something about the border. I remember how everyone could cross the border for dinner or shopping, and no one cared.
First time viewer. I was curious because I am American and moved to France four years ago. I agree with a lot of your points! I had to do some digging and ended up spending this whole afternoon watching the referenced videos just for context on this video. So, thanks for giving me further ways to procrastinate from writing.
On the topic of yards: I hobby sew and crochet, and pretty much only thought in inches and yards when working on making a pattern or ordering material. This is where I first got metric to click in my head when I moved here. So, yards turned to meters and I basically do all my measurements in centimeters and meters. And It is SO MUCH EASIER NOW. But hell, I cannot think of people's height in any other way but feet and inches. I have no idea how tall I am in metric. My doctors hate me. lol
@bradleybrown8428 Not really! My French language skills are really bad. But sometimes I will forget the name of something in English but remember it in French.
@@ActualLiliCakes luckily 40% of English is French based.
how high is the ceiling and the door frame, might help your mental reference for your own height.
@@jyvben1520 Haha, yeah. That has helped a lot. My pronunciation is the main issue. I have some hearing impairment, and I'm told there's some minute difference to the way I'm pronouncing something but I can't hear any difference. So, now I don't want to speak out loud and that just makes it worse. It's a vicious cycle.
5' is 153cm 6' is 183cm so it's just a matter of 30 'bits' in between. 5'6" = 168...
In the Netherlands we decimalized our imperial system before fully switching to metric. Examples of this are the now defunct Dutch miles (1km), thumbs (1cm), and lead (10g). There are two we still use informally: pounds and ounces. With pounds being 500g and ounces being 100g.
Australians might have given out free rulers when changing to metric, but for some reason decided to make tablespoons 20ml while everywhere else (the US, UK and even New Zealand included) is 15ml. I didn't realise this until my 30s. What makes it even more confusing is that depending on where shops get their measuring spoons from they could be 15ml instead of 20ml. Lesson here, know where your recipe comes from unless it has been copied from somewhere else then all I can say is good luck!
Yeah, that really messes up the 3 teaspoons to a tablespoon and 4 tablespoons to 1/4 cup as these measurements assume the ~15ml (14.78677ml) standard size of a teaspoon
I have measuring spoons that are 15ml and 20ml both labels as 1TBS.
Yay Australia!
I didn't even know how much a teaspoon was, I just took a teaspoon, filled it up, and prayed that it was the right sized and filled the right way
A US gallon is 16oz while a British gallon is 20oz, so it’s not just Australia who likes to mess around
I'm from Poland (so we should have everything in one standard size, right?!) and every spoon (and teaspoon) I own has a different volume. 😅
Great video! By the way the DIN Papersizes are based on the metric system :-) DIN A0 is a square Meter and the number in the definition is the amount of folds (A0 = zero folds... and A4= 4 folds)
On the temperature range point, until relatively recently (I think I'm the same age as Evan, and this matches my childhood) it wasn't guaranteed that the UK would hit sustained 20+ degrees Celsius in summer. So we essentially had/have a system that boiled down to 10-20 Celsius being 'fine/nice', 20-30 being 'hot' and 30+ being 'Jesus make it stop'.
The north of the UK is still there. The temperatures are already autumnal this far north, and the cloud cover and rain have been incessant.
@@CatKinKitKata big difference is our humidity is almost always 50 or above in the uk. And it goes up in summer. So when it gets to the high 30s, or 40s, and it's like 80 humidity it's horrific, especially in a brick victorian house with no AC.
In iberia the humidity generally drops in summer, and rises in winter, so atleast when you sweat, it can cool you down.
The uk is weird in that you are never more that 100 miles from the sea, where as in Spain that's pretty easy to beat.
@@cheasepriest We get the same problem in Czechia; a lot of people are very surprised how cold or hot it can get, despite the temperatures seeming rather mild. And of course, ACs are still very uncommon, outside of the glass & steel monstrosities of "office space". It helps that ACs don't seem to work very well here anyway. The humidity gets you. I can't imagine living somewhere even more humid :D Also, near the sea or the mountains you often get constant comfortably cool breeze which makes the heat much easier to take. I was recently in Switzerland where it was 31 °C... and it was actually quite cold; we could stay in the water only for ten minutes or so, while we quite commonly spend an hour or more in colder water while the air is barely above 20 °C. The weird thing is, you didn't really feel the wind - it wasn't _strong_ ... it was just always there, carrying heat away diligently. The worst is humid, hot and still on one side, and cold and windy on the other.
The weirdest experience I had was in Dubai, where I happened to be in over 50 degree heat... and it didn't really feel hot at all (as long as you kept out of direct sunlight, which was of course fierce). The same way, sometimes 4 °C can feel a lot colder than -20 °C, depending on the other conditions. People often joke that "10 °C in winter means shorts and T-shirt, 10 °C in summer means a coat"... but it's not just about the perception. The heat transfer _is_ different.
The most annoying part is when nights get warm-ish and wet. Around 20 °C and above, you no longer get a chance for everything to appreciably cool down through the night (and of course, nights are shorter in summer). And as you await the cooling of the evening, you're just disappointed that while yes, the air gets colder... it also tends to be _much_ more humid. So you can even feel too cold, while _still_ sweating like crazy inside, unable to truly keep the body temperature in check without that.
@@CatKinKitKat I suspect that's more about understanding you're supposed to keep out of direct sunlight, though :D Once you get far enough north, it's easy to forget the Sun is quite dangerous. Or that there's many good reasons why people shouldn't drink alcohol, especially during the day. Or that you should drink enough water. Or wear appropriate clothing.
And to add. I don't agree with him that you can't communicated accurately in Celsius. You can say low 20's, mid 20's, high 20's, and do the same for the teens, 30's and 40's. In this part of the world, Anything low 20's or below is a bit cold, mid 20's to high 20's nice, low to mid 30's is starting to get a bit warm, and high 30's to anything in the 40's is getting a bit too much. We maybe get a solid 4-8 days a summer each year in the 40's.
I don't use temperature ranges very much. Usually I say something like "up to 23 degrees," and then people know what kind of weather I'm talking about.
i think what the swedish comment was getting at is more of a counter argument to the "farenheit makes more sense because its based around the body, why would i need to know when water does things, i am not water!" kind of thing that you hear a lot. just to showcase that the freezing point of water can be very important thing to base your system around, just as much as how farenheit is based around the body. i agree that its quite literally just based on what you grew up with, ive been using the same argument when discussing these things all the time lol
and also you wount need to figure out if it 32 or 34, you just need to know its - or +.
yeah when i was growing up my mum had a lovely set of balance scales for baking that i think she got as a wedding present. It had a removable brass dish on one end and a little brass plate on the other on which we would put little copper ounce weights and big cast iron pound weights. I have fond memories of using that when making Christmas cakes with my mum or weighing out the ingredients for her when she was making wine. People in the UK have been using scales for soo long. I can imagine back in the day something like that might have been a luxury and people would have used scoops and cups and things. But not for more than a century even when i was a kid
Different people have different body temperature, so Farenheit uses an arbitraty "middle" number (and, to be honest, if you are 100°F=37.8°C you've got a mild fever...), whereas the freezing temperature of water is fixed. But, at least, temperature has no "internal" convertions to do, so the main "problem" is only that the rest of the world uses Celsius. Not that big of a deal, in my opinion, and pretty easy, if you need it, to use the one you're not used to.
The thing about the temperature debate i dont get is people saying that fahrenheit is superior because its more precise, but is that really relevant, can you really feel the difference between 75f and 76f? i for sure can't tell much difference between 24c and 25c (~75f and 77f)
I agree it's all in what you're used to. I'm Farenheit, but 32 F or 0 C, don't do much for me. The freezing point of water doesn't affect me. It's got to be lower.
I will still defend Celsius as water is one of most common chemical compunds on the earth, so scale based on state of this compound where transision between states is on 0 and 100 is actually more universal in world which uses 10based (decimal) numeric system.
This. The whole point of metric is that every unit is in some way designed to operate on a decimal scale so it becomes a lot easier to understand the scale of the unit when it already functions under a normalised ruleset. On the other hand, imperial-based systems are a complete free-for-all for how much value each unit contains in relation to other units. It's already hard enough to learn the measurements in their own categories, let alone when taken in the greater whole. That's why metric as a whole is a better system - because it's a consistently consistent baseline from which you can more comfortably describe more abstract or specific values while minimising miscommunication as much as possible. You don't have to think long about which unit to use when they all follow the same numerical structure and in case of multiple units, you can instantly convert any unit by simply adding or removing zeroes.
Plus, while he says that Celsius is only intuitive because its baseline zero is a familiar value, at least it's an example with practical applications for an average person. I don't think anyone outside the chemistry field has ever needed to know what the exact value of the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice and salt is. It's such an oddly specific case to be used for a measuring system in everyday speech.
The thing about the temperature debate i dont get is people saying that fahrenheit is superior because its more precise, but is that really relevant, can you really feel the difference between 75f and 76f? i for sure can't tell much difference between 24c and 25c (~75f and 77f)
Except Anders Celsius devised his scale with water _boiling_ at 0° and freezing at 100°. Jean-Pierre Cristin suggested investing it (and named it centigrade as there were 100 grade points between the two marks) , so we're really using degrees Cristin...
Regarding Fahrenheit, it made marking the instruments easy using a straight edge and a pair of compasses (something you can't do to subdivide 0 to 100 in 100 even marks) - 0° was freezing brine, 32° was freezing water (a difference of a power of 2), and the other chosen point was 96° - "normal" body temperature - which is 64, another power of 2 above 32°.
With the chosen marks in place, they could sub-divide by bisecting between existing marks until every 1° mark had been made. If you start 100° apart the first bisection gives you 50, the next 25 and 75, but the next bisection will give you 12.5, 37.5, 62.5, and 87.5 - you cannot bisect any further to whole numbers.
I was working in Éire over the time it changed from using the Punt as currency to using the Euro. For years I'd been told "It would be impossible to switch" and yet one week I flew out to Éire and everyone was paying for things in Irish Punt, and the next week I flew out and I was paying for things in Euro, with nary a word to be said. Sure the price labels in the shops were priced in both currencies for a few weeks around the switch, to get people used to it, but people adapted pretty quickly.
The euro was introduced at the same time in all the eu countries that adopted it at the same time. It wasn’t like it existed in some eu countries already and then Ireland adopted.
And what does that have to do with my experience@@liamjohnhawkins4212, as someone from a (then) EU country not adopting the Euro, seeing how seemlessly it was adopted in one of the countries where it was?
We were told over and over again that couldn't happen, that it would cause years of disruption, that the U.K. would lose some part of it's national identity if we were to join the Euro.
Of course it was all rubbish, and fed into the blip in history which resulted in the worst political decision for many generations, and one which will negatively affect us for so many more.
@@liamjohnhawkins4212yes you would expect all the countries that adopted the euro at the same time to start using it at the same time. Eleven countries planned to adopt it simultaneously and 12 actually did. Many other EU countries didn't and some haven't.
Exactly @@charlestaylor9424, I was contrasting my experience in Éire with my home country, which was a member of the EU at the time, but opted not to join the Euro.
@@liamjohnhawkins4212 I mean some newer Eurozone countries did have that experience, for example Greece switched to the Euro in 2001, Slovenia in 2007, Latvia in 2014, Croatia in 2023 etc.
People still get used to it easily.
As an Albertan, who's dad was born in England, so have a lot of family there, I always find the teperatures amuzing. Here it ranges from about -40°C to about 32°C in a year. One thing I like C for is driving, as +/-4°C is the most dangerous time to drive. Nice and simple up and down range to explain and remember.
Here in the U.S. the air temperatures range approximately from 0 to 100 and you know that when the temperature is in the low 30s it's dangerous for ice on the road. How is that any easier or harder than yours?
The funny thing with celcius is that it is so much less granular that you don't have to say in the low 20s, you can just say "around 23°C" and it covers pretty much the same range as low 80s or whatever :)
Celcius is directly related to the average heat energy in an object too, giving conversions to things like joules easier.
Chelchiuz*
I have never understood how someone can think that 8/32 of an inch is less confusing than 8mm (7.94mm to be exact I think) for example.
8/32? Nobody would say that. They would say 1/4 inch
6.35 mm actually. Which is honestly a rounding error for half a centimeter anyway.
You mean a rounding error for 6mm, surely? Nobody would sensibly round down nearly 30%
@@NotThatOneThisOne I didn't mean a literal rounding error. I was more saying that milimeter precision down to 1 milimeter is rarely necessary.
The fun part is calculating. You have a piece of a board that is 1' 13/128" and you need another board to fit these two into a slot (?) that is 2' 17/32". How long must the second board be?
I don't care which system you use, until you force me to use it.
I'm an American, living in New York, and I use metric. Its easy, much easier, and makes much more sense than cups or pints or.. gallons or teaspoons or fingers or whatever arbitrary measurements everyone else uses here. Using grams and milliliters is objectively more intuitive, end of discussion.
Honestly, as a European from a fully metric country (apart from TV sizes, lol), I don't expect Americans to use it in their day to day lives, like, everyone around you thinks in a different form of measurement. Still, it's nice to know the basics.
@@PKM1010 even when I used imperial I was like "how can I use this system of measurement? Oh I need 20 different utensils in order to do what metric can do using one measuring jar and a set of scoops
@@PKM1010 - People in metric countries who are in the business of selling and installing tyres deal with imperial measures everyday and they don't feel like they're commiting a crime. 😀
Unfortunately, if you actually build anything and have to go to the hardware store or have to do anything with your plumbing or fencing or just buying a new ticket for your fence then you are not using metric. Inherently it's not really that big a deal either way because there used to be so many standards through the industrial age which made things an absolutely nightmare. So if our biggest problem is having to deal with a few SAE versus metric issues, we've improved tenfold easily. Even then, I mean you have weird things like the way that a Japanese screwdriver operates and why if you use European or American screwdrivers, you have a much higher likelihood of stripping them out. But most of the population has no idea that there is a differentiation. There are a lot of goofy standards and it's partly why a European mechanic costs more because they're tooling is slightly different. I would be very happy to convert to the metric system but it's really not feasible in America even though we have a lot of industry that does operate in metric.
My UK cooks teaspoon set is metric. 1 tablespoon = 15ml. 1 teaspoon = 5 ml, also has 1/2 and 1/4 teaspoons. Much the easiest way to measure small amounts of, for example, baking soda or vanilla paste.
Regarding Celsius for weather. Living in Aus we also have a huge range of temperature we can experience in a year (In Victoria we can get from 2 degrees to 48 degrees throughout the year), and Celsius covers that range just as well as Fahrenheit would. Its 100% just the one you have used the most in a wide range that you prefer
Fun fact: todays empirical system has its sizes defined by the metric system, whereas the metric system uses universal constants for its definition - such as the speed of light in vacuum, the weight of a proton ect.
Two American woodworkers conducted an experiment. They built some pieces of furniture, the same each time, one used metric, the other in imperial. They made several and also switched between systems and the result was, at least to their surprise, when they were using metric, they had generally less waste.
I call shenanigans. That's silly. The US customary system is just as precise and accurate as the metric system. The only difference is the zero point and the size of the units. So what? Every metric linear, area, volume, or weight measurement converts to an exact US customary measurement. Decimal US customary unit tape measures, rulers, calipers, scales, and other measuring instruments are readily available. I highly doubt they had less waste when working in metric because all non-imported lumber and sheet goods (plywood, particle board, OSB, etc.) sold in the US are sold in US customary sizes (some imported plywood is sold in metric sizes).
@@royagilmore You're forgetting metric is far easier to add, multiply ', how many chances you have to make a mistake just adding feet and inches?
According to you, the rest of the world is stupid. Well, you and distinguest company of Liberia and Myanmar.
BTW, I wasn't talking about precision, it is a big matter of ease of use.
@@royagilmoreI agree; as even here in Canada we still use imperial in woodworking as all our building materials are still made in imperial units (4x8 ft sheets of plywood, etc.) Due to the amount of export to the US. Now I would happily use metric for everything if I had the option but it's simply not efficient when buying material.
@@royagilmore US customary standard units are defined in Metric terms. So, the differences are labeling and measuring tools. Using the measuring tools depends on the knowledge and skill of the person wielding the tool.
@@royagilmoreSee you say that but your ignoring the human element. The system of measurement can be just as precise but the human using it can find one easier to use. Converting metric units is more intuitive and easier to do since it is based around using multiples of 10 which is how our base system works. Possibly this is where less waste was generated.
Also metric system measurements have lower values than imperials once again making calculations easier. These sort of things could cause a difference.
Another human element is that if the imperial system was their normal then working in the metric would require greater focus from the workers as they would be checking and double checking every measurement and cut they made which could lead to less errors.
No reason that story couldn’t be true.
me clicking on this when i didnt watch the johnny harris metric video
Me neither, but I don't have time for silly regressive arguments.
same (FK Johnny "Hairless" FRICKIN LIB)
Fun fact: in Brazil we are full metric, buuuuut when we talk about cooking, we still use tablespoons/cups/coffee spoons/pinch and a specific measurement "american cup" most of it are writen in recepies form our grandmas and moms
shows the meddling of the USA in other countries business in a lot of unexpected areas
We do use tablespoons and teaspoons alongside everything being metric, but also everyone knows a teaspoon is 5ml and a tablespoon is 15ml, so you can fairly easily increase or reduce as needed if you're making a much larger or smaller quantity of what you are cooking.
Evan so you touched on what is quickly becoming a top pet peeve of mine with the whole stick of butter thing. Americans refusing to accept the rest of the world isn't America. Or just accepting anything they hear about anything outside of America.
For instance, recently I saw a comment chain talk about how a person came to England and went to a house party, and everyone had to cook their own food and people seemed offended when the guy asked why they are doing this, and said it must be a cultural thing. Someone responded essentially saying "I'm American, I'm not English, I've never been to England, and I know no one in England. But that is definitely a cultural thing as we don't do that here." and I sorta just honestly lost it on this person. Do you know HOW many times my American friends have messaged me being like "Yo, so I heard you call strawberry lemonade a squiqilypopfrumplejazz, is that true?" and every time I have to ask them what? I adore my American friends, there are great American products out there, America has such beautiful nature and scenery, I am by no means an American hater. But as I age my tolerance for Americans steadily dies. I have *LITERALLY* told Americans that I am not from America before, yet they still have tried to help me by giving me American stores, areas, products, practices, American nutrition facts, I could go on! I have spoken to many people from all over the world, yet only Americans are like this!
The party sounds like a potluck and I thought that was the American name for it.
@@flemmingpedersen567 see, I think the issue was it wasn't like people brought food that they cooked to a party, as you said like a potluck, the issue was that people/the host brought food, and everyone took turns cooking their individual dinners in the hosts kitchen, I maybe shoulda stressed that in my original comment, it was people cooking individual meals one after the other in the kitchen. But that's why it angered me that an American said "We don't do that here so it was definitely cultural!" as I have NEVER been to, seen, or even heard of that type of set up before! Like you said, even in England I have experienced "potlucks" but not whatever that host did!
@@kierancampire Oh I misunderstood.
But yeah, that's not something I have ever heard of either. Sounds more like a theme party than anything cultural.
@@flemmingpedersen567 mmmhh that's what I said! We don't do that over here!
But my issue is, other Americans will see something they've never seen before, another American has ordained it as "British" and they just blindly accept that as truth, they then repeat this new interesting "fact" they discovered and even add on their own details, that's then when my American friends say "Hey so I heard..." and every time I have to go "No."
It's just something slowly driving me crazier and crazier :') Thankfully my American friends are generally quite knowledged on things outside of America, but every so often they do get caught out on something and I have to correct them haha
The leftist-media-filtered version of america that foreigners get is just as bizarre as the weird ideas that some americans have about foreign countries. I know because im an american born in a foreign country, to american parents, and have lived in and out of america.
I have a friend who i went to highschool with. Hes a good person but i cannot talk about america with him because his entire idea of america is formed by whiny redditors complaining and lying about trump. So he'll think things like flat earth being a popular idea here, or catching a stray bullet being a real probabilistic concern instead of a freak accident. Its frustrating.
I'm also an American who has lived with both systems. I currently live in the US and don't mind using US measurements for everything except when baking -- I switch everything over to metric because it's so much more exact, when baking absolutely relies on being exact.
Yeah I really value a nice cooking scale in grams for things like baking or making soap.
it doesnt really require you being exact, knowing what something is supposed to look like is more important then measuring down to the gram, flours can be more or less absorbent depending on many variables and then need more or less liquid
that being said i do find it easier to place the bowl on the scale and pour everything in compared to measuring out in cups and washing cups
Your joke about "moving to the USA - god forbid" made me think about how I and other people who talked about it here in Poland felt about it in the past vs now. When I was a kid ~15-20 years ago, USA was this big dream, pretty much everyone I knew wanted to move there, myself included. But over the years it changed drastically. Now, from all the people I know, I can only think of my aunt who sees moving to the US positively, and even she isnt making any plans at all about actually doing it. It's mostly the fact that Poland really changed and "grew up", but probably also bad reputation US is getting for quite a few years now, thanks to Internet getting more and more popular. Ofc it might be only my bubble, but even just looking around the polish Internet, moving to US isn't really a thing anymore. Would it be an interesting idea for a video? International opinions about moving to USA over the years, or more broadly just opinions about USA?
Its the same in the UK from my experience; very few people actually want to move to the US now. 10-15 years ago it was so romanticised and seen as cheaper and easier to live there, more opportunities etc. part of me wonders whether its the increase in US news and politics being talked about over here?
It's not just you. Back in the day "moving to the USA" was the ultimate dream. Nowadays I know more Americans that moved to Poland than the other way round - and they're really happy with the fact that you can safely walk around the city almost anywhere, anytime and not be afraid of getting shot - and that you can actually, gasp, WALK! you don't need to take your car even if you just want to cross the street.
It's not just in Polabd. I'm Danish and seeing the same thing.
I was an ex-pat in the states and besides missing those 3-4 actual friends I made (when saying actual, it's because American's idea of friendships are far more superficial than Scandinavien's in generel) I dont ever want to go back, either!
@@GCOSBenbow I think you are on the right track here. Especially the politics (like Trump) and the increasing hate against anything that's not the "normal white straight" is very concerning. Add to that the increasing power of religious nutcases (flat-earth, anti-science, anti-everything-nice) and the deplorable state of health care and education, and I think that the "American Dream" that looked so nice in the past, has crumbled into a pile of unrecognizable bits and pieces. It scares people...
They fooled an entire generation with jeans, rock&roll and Coca Cola
Scoop peanut butter out of tub and scrape into cup measure, press down and level off. Scoop and scrape peanut butter out of cup into baking bowl. Wash and dry cup measure to measure other ingredients. Or. Put baking bowl onto scale, set to zero (hit button). Scoop in 250g of peanut butter. Reset to zero, pour in flour to required weight, reset, pour in sugar and so on. No extra washing and drying, no waste left in cup. I have a set of US cups, I use one for scooping cat kibble and one for scooping washing powder, not sure where the rest of them are.
If your scale does negatives you can also put the PB on the scale and remove what you need, which can be easier in some situations.
Omg your rant about butter made me chuckle because I have a container of spreadable butter for daily use and only get sticks for baking.
It’s so interesting to learn about imperial and metric systems.
In 2005, distances were already in km in Ireland. It's the speed limits that were changed over one night.
Crossing the border (NI still uses mph) it's like a change from speed limits to speed challenges. Some of them have genuinely had me wondering, 'this is a bit quick, it can't be right!'...and then I get caught out by a toll road and have no Euros...
In very rural areas there were still a fair few of the ancient old road signs with distances in miles. I think they finally all got replaced at the same time as they switched over the speed limit signs to km/h. There might still be one or two scattered around on very rural back roads in the middle of nowhere...
I always use "imperial freedom units" for the US units because I find the contradiction appropriately humorous.
For me, in Canada, what I use and how I think in terms of measurement depends on what I grew up with in the house. They changed over to Metric when I was in Grade 3, so a lot of things we had around the house (thermometer, rulers, etc.) were still in Imperial units. So while I am aware that normal body temperature is 36 deg Celsius, I reference the 98.6 deg F in my own head simply because that was what was available to measure things. Same with baking and cups and ounces and so on. However, by the time I started driving, all the speed signs and cars were showing Metric, so I don’t think of speed and distance in Imperial. It’s weird when I go to the States and the sign says to turn off in 1/8 of a mile, instead of 250 metres or something. And for some things, such as construction, since a lot of stuff comes from the US, they kept using Imperial measures for most construction things. For example, wall studs are not said to be 40.6 centimeters apart, they are 16 inch on centre. You just kind of get used to whatever everyone else is using.
*stick butter argument* EXACTLY!!!!!! I've had that exact mini struggle all the time and i freaking live in the US. Wtf do i do if it's BETWEEN the two ticks?!? And you can't just use spreadable butter for like a frying pan cuz it's different! There will always be the in-between!
Plus..
Most people here put the butter into a butter dish !
just imagine, its summer, you just bourht some butter, but then you walked too long and now have to freeze butter to solid again.
My friend from the Middle East was trying to bake a brownie from American recipes and it wasn't working at all for them so they asked if I have a recipe to recommend (I'm from Europe) and I gave them the one I use and they SCREAMED rejoicing when they saw butter described as bricks with grams cause that's what they also use in their country. Then proceeded to rant about "those stupid butter sticks". It was hilarious 😂 The brownie finally came out good 👍
Ive legit never heard of "sticks" of butter lmao
@@eduardostapenko6808 And most of all, after the butter got soft, it was unevenly squished by the other things in the bag... Even if you put it in the fridge/freezer, there is no chance that the little ticks on the package are still useful.
I'm from the metric system, and also a big fan of flight simming. That activity has people learn nautical mile for distance, knots and mach for speed, feet for altitude. Anyone with enough practice will have a grasp on those units regardless of the system they're from, because it makes totally sense. So yeah, one can switch system. Anyone with enough practice.
Actually nautical miles and knots have nothing to do with impérial. Just 60 nautical miles between 2 parallels, allowing the estimate route...
@@CaptainDangeax Well the idea in my original post is only to show that it's not impossible to switch system regardless of which one is from, and that includes from US units to the metric system.
Although I confess, I do not enjoy cups or US gallons. I have very little practice in that area either.
@@YorranKlees Impossible ? Not French ! Considering how our metric took over the whole world, including USA where imperial units are actually defined after metric references. One inch is 2,54 cm, farenheit is celcius*(9/5) + 32. And so on. So getting rid of surrogate units is just distributing dual rulers during a long time, while mandating resellers to use metrics (one liter milk), wait 20 years and eventually stop selling dual scale rulers. Also stop teaching imperial as main system, but only for what it is : a surrogate system. I have an engineer graduate, and I learned imperial for what it is, a retard system we have the bad luck to encounter sometimes. For example, in electronics, all components datasheet are now in metrics and electronics softwares also use metric for their internal
@@CaptainDangeax I said NOT impossible in both my previous messages.
Besides, who are you to tell other countries what to do, and be jugemental on other people's frames of references?
It's not about converting measurements (well, unless you want to send something to space, we all know the story). It's for the common folk to feel things. When you speak a foreigh language, you don't translate. Same thing, in the scope of this video.
@@YorranKlees Whatever... Never mind...
I was 10 when the UK change to the decimal system for money. I was so happy as maths was soooo much easier 😂
5:35 i always find it fascinating that the uk tend to talk about height in either feet and inches or specifically cm:s, because in sweden casually we just use metres, "yeah im 1 and 78" or "im one and 80", we never rarely ever say "im one hundred and eight-two centimetres", just "im one eighty-two".
About Canada.
I'm not Canadian but I follow a few Canadian TH-camrs and they use both metric and "imperial" for different thing so someone made a flow chart to figure out when they use each one. It's hilarious, look it up.
This is true. In Canada we measure ourselves in feet and inches but distances in kilometres. We measure the temperature outside in Celsius and the temperature in our oven in Fahrenheit. There are many more examples.
Don't say that the US uses imperial units, they are a bit sensitive about this
The US took the units that Britain used in the 1700s and they have tweaked them a bit since
Britain introduced the imperial units in the 1820s. The units used prior to that date were sort of defacto but the imperial measurements were covered by law. Interestingly the imperial gallon etc is bigger than the historical one (the one that the US) uses as the UK made it bigger, apparently so that they could ship more beer from the breweries
As an American, I can promise you we don’t care if you call them Imperial, we all know what you mean.
@@philjameson292 A gallon of water weighs 10 pounds, except in USA. You imply that the British invented a new system in the 1800s. I am pretty sure the USA and UK simply standardised on different preexisting "systems".
BTW Cars in Canada get more miles per gallon than US cars. Litres per 100 km is the same.
@@NRBD2 no I am not implying that the British invented a new system of units.
English units had been in usage in the British Isles since the middle ages, which were a mixture of historical measurements
When the US gained its independence it took the English units and these have been tweaked a bit in the intervening years into the US Customary Units
In the 1820s the UK formalized the English Units into the Imperial System. This is where the 10 lbs of water = 1 imperial gallon comes from
Interestingly there were many types of gallon. The US gallon is based off the Queen Anne or wine Gallon, which I think was the gallon that was used in the 1700s.
The imperial gallon (or statute gallons) was close to the ale gallon. The apocryphal tale I have read was the ale gallon was chosen in the UK as it fewer barrels to transport the growing quantity of beer that was being shipped to London during the industrial revolution
9:53 Aye, from your upbringing _exactly._ Here in Australia, where we range from almost tropical to temperate, we find it makes more sense to use ℃ the way you use ℉-during our spring or autumn we _also_ refer to the _low 20s_ and the _high 20s_ to know whether we should bring a jacket or not, _low 30s_ or _high 30s_ during our summer to know what fabric (or, for others, how much fabric) to wear, _low 10s_ or _high 10s_ on how many layers we ought to put during our winters, or whether we should bring out our gloves or scarves. Again, like you said, it's just a number, but for us the delineation of our 10 degrees Celsius fit quite snugly with our seasons _even if_ it doesn't quite fit the range you're used.
Speaking of seasons, you can get _a lot of argument back and forth_ between Aussies and Americans on the proper way to reckon seasons-we Aussies use _meteorological_ seasons (i.e. the seasons begin on the 1st of particular months) instead of _astronomical_ seasons (i.e. seasons begin on either the solstice or equinox). I've seen both sides call the other stupid and idiotic when each find out how the other side thinks. Utter hilarity.
Yards are trade specific. Example, carpet … x number of square yards, fabric… 3 1/4 for that dress. Otherwise we don’t use it much.
'Yards are trade specific.' Not in countries that use the metric system.
@@eattherich9215 I simply assumed for the USA where we actually still use such measures, because Evan was commenting that in the USA we don’t use yards. I just pointed out there are a few times we do use it.
Looking up a simple sewing pattern and only having a tape measured in inches and cm... I would need 3 different units for that.
@@nemi-ru5318: sewing patterns use both "American" and metric measurements, so your two system tape measure can cope.
Funny that you mentioned Harry Potter. I once met an American book editor on a day-hike in upstate New York. She was a literary editor for the Harry Potter series in the US. She was translating it from English into American English for the American market. I said why translate? She said, Americans got confused when Harry put on a jumper or when Ron advised Harry to keep his pecker up.
???, I thought… She pointed out that for Americans, a jumper was ‘a little girl’s dress’! And ‘keeping your pecker up’ would definitely involve more than trying to stay cheerful…we are two nations separated enough by a common language to need American editions of books in English.
That doesn't mean they should "translate" terms. That only solidifies American parochialism and their belief that their system is universal. Try broadening your hotizons.
@@blackletter2591 you can't expect expect a little child reading what could be their first novel with an English to simplified English dictionary next to them, though
10:30 a very common way is to say 24+- (twentyfour plus minus) and pretty much everyone who is using Celsius understands that this is a temperature range of 24 °C plus or minus 2 °C, so in range of 22 to 26 °C. It's just as easy and fast - and again more precise - than "in the 70th". Same can be used for time "I'll be there at 1500 plusminus 5", means between 1455 and 1505.
I'm British and I don't think I've ever heard anyone use plus-minus when talking about the weather (or time for that matter). Personally I don't think a temperature range on it's own is particularly useful, because how it actually feels will depend a lot on humidity and wind - both of which fluctuate quite a lot in the UK.
@@kaspianepps7946it’s common in Germany, the Netherlands, etc. They will even say “plus minus X” to mean “circa X”. They get almost militantly mad when other Europeans don’t understand them.
(The Smurf is from Switzerland.)
@@kaspianepps7946It may not be a thing in English, but it certainly is in Danish, and apparently Dutch and German too
@@SeralyneYT Same in French "plus ou moins X" which could be translated as "more or less X"
In swedish we use the word "around" to mean +-5 instead. Det kommer vara runt 20grader idag, "It will be around 20 degrees today". If you want to be more precise use circa (cirka) which is less than 5.
About the baking thing, I'm from Europe (Poland) and a lot of recipes here, especially the passed down ones, use the volume measures (glass not a cup, tbs, ts). But here's the thing: a lot of kitches appliances used to be (it changes nowadays) pretty standardised which meant that a regular glass has either 250 ml or 200 ml and table spoon holds 15 ml and tea spoon 5 ml. So it was still based on metric and you could convert and calculate stuff easily if you wanted.
Our old recipe books use "coffee cups" (yeah, Finland :-) which means 1,5dl for each cup. Now it's deciliters or by weight, with the table/tea spoon as a short hand for the 15ml /5 ml. The cup/glass makes sense if you're scooping the flour with the cup instead of using some measuring container to pour the flour into. Same with the spoons.
@@Timoohz Thanks. Old Hungarian recipes that I have seen - in English, sadly - use weight, so I assumed the volume measurement was due to the cost and difficulty of transporting weights and scales in the frontier USA. It is interesting to see it exists in Europe. Maybe the Americans got it from European settlers?
@charleshayes2528 I think it's just because it is so handy: get some flour from the bag with a cup. How do you measure it? By counting how many scoops you take. No extra equipment needed. Anyone has some kind of cup (nowadays often a 1dl measuring cup), but not everyone has a scale.
I have a beloved cake recipe from my mom. If she didn't tell me which cup(the 200ml) to use in my childhood it wouldn't have worked. Also the flour and starch was measured in non leveled tablespoons, so the recipe had different results until I figured out the right amount of mountain on top of the spoon. It's way easier to send the recipe to someone now that I weight everything out.
And to be fair: lack of scale isn't really a good argument against metric anymore. They're not as uncommon and expensive anymore and the batteries last a long time nowadays( I remember that being an issue back in the day's) and there a even some without batteries- although they are a little less accurate.
Yeah, a lot mf my mama's recipes call for a 'szlanka' of something. The other thing I find in her przepisy is the use of 'deka' which we don't commonly use in English. eg: 15 dg mąka will be 150g in English.
I was born in the US, but lived in a metric country for 6 years from the age of 9. So, basically I grew up with both systems, and given that, I know that overall, the metric system is superior for almost everything, but realistically, you can do everything you need in either system.
Having lived and made things in the real world, while being trained and working in a technical field, please provide a real world case where the metric system is superior for the average person?
Given that most conversations are checked or can be inaccurate and that most measurements have to be adapted to the real world, it is highly unlikely that there will be a real advantage for the metric system. It was designed for science and adopted for international trade. It was not designed to be and is not actually more useful for anything practical.
@@ianbelanger7459 baking. It’s much easier and tidier to measure everything that is mixed together into a bowl over a scale, and measurements of things like flour and powdered sugar are more accurate by weight. For projects involving large volumes of flour it makes such a big difference that most home cooks will learn to use a scale and complain to recipe writers who don’t supply conversions by weight (even though converting recipes involves learning three numbers that repeat over and over). We also find it much easier to use a scale than other measuring tools at my workplace, where we make customized personal care products to use on the spot. Using a scale cut the dishwashing chores in half. Maybe this doesn’t count because it’s a workplace, but we are making individual sizes on a small counter, not industrial amounts in a commercial kitchen. That said I am always amused by infomercial style “this is impossible” complaints about the imperial system with spoons and rulers flying around
@@ianbelanger7459As a cook this is easy.
You're working as a cook for a large wedding and are in charge of making Vanilla pudding for 200 guests.
Recipe for 4 servings:
1/3 cup of sugar
3 Tbps Corn Starch
1/8 tsp salt
2 cups of milk
1 Tbsp Butter
1 tsp Vanilla extract
Now convert all these so you can measure those ingredients and calculate the cost when you buy in bulk.
@@ianbelanger7459 any time you are speaking if another person coming from a metric country, using metric is superior for the average person
@@anna-flora999 quite true, which is why internationally traded goods like oil use the most recognized system for that good. That argument is the equivalent of saying that communication is most effective in someone's native language, which, while true, doesn't prove the superiority or general usefulness of either language.
The Ukelele ending is phenomenal ^^. Your videos have gotten better and more open over time. Although i am probably not the the type of viewer that is most expected to watch this. Not british, not american, not an english speaker.
For what it's worth, I'm a Brit living in Spain and to this day, decades after joining the EURO, Spanish people still reckon the value of high ticket items like, houses, cars etc in pesates. e.g. how much will a swimming pool cost? Two millions pesatas (equals twelve thousand euros). Also, they use weird measures of distance and area for land, like finagre, which vary across Spain according to where you are, However the metric system is winning one death at a time and bringing order to a mad country!
when you get into small towns in Spain, especially with seniors, they will give prices in 'duros'. A 'duro' was worth 5 pesetas -- so 20 duros = 100 pesetas. So two currencies back...
I bought my house in Croatia some years before Croatia joined the Euro but house prices were already quoted in Euros. When organising the payment I had to enquire whether they actually wanted Kuna or Euros.
It far less common nowadays and will disappear in a decade or two.
Don't you brits bid on auctions in *ahem* guineas?
@@unclejoeoakland😂 omg that was hilarious only because I live in England and the last time I heard that was in historical drama or read Dickens novel
Old British recipes - like those I inherited from my grandma - do use pounds and ounces for weighing ingredients. For very small quantities (like spices or baking powder), they used pinches and teaspoons for quantities less than half an ounce.
But remember that these also predated digital scales, so weights could only be measured to within about half an ounce anyway, unless you had a balance scale and an (expensive) set of apothecaries' weights.
As for temperature, neither Celsius nor Fahrenheit is really all that metric. The SI unit is Kelvin, which is the same size as a Celsius degree but has a completely different zero. Kelvin is really useful for things that are commonly way outside the range of temperatures we experience for weather - it gives you an immediate appreciation for the big differences between liquid helium (4K), liquid nitrogen (77K), dry ice (195K) and water ice (273K) that the equivalents in Celsius (which just read as three different versions of "way too cold", plus zero) do not. But a temperature scale for weather where 250K is really cold and 320K is really hot is one that is not a scale that is especially useful on a day to day basis - it's great for the impact of "puny humans can only survive in a tiny fraction of the wider universe", but not much good for telling you if you need to put a coat on or not. This is why Celsius persists for human-scale temperatures, and why most scientists would be equally comfortable with using Rankine for science and Fahrenheit for human-scale stuff.
As a Brit I've looked up recipes and occasionally come up with one from the States. My issue with cups and sticks and trying to find a conversion (to either metric or imperial) is that they appear to tend to vary, depending presumably on which state your dealing with.
Not so much which state but US customary and British imperial which have differences as he mentioned. I ended up 3d printing new US customary measuring cups for my bread machine after I lost the one that came with it.
Trouble is that when measuring dry goods; flour, sugar etc...weighing is accurate and consistent.. 250 grams is always 250 grams... but volumetric systems are totally incinsistent because it depends on how packed the dry goods are in the cup... there can be a significant difference.. but the smaller the amount.. such as a teaspoon is useful for small amounts of stuff like salt or bicarbonate of soda.. the smaller the amount the less th e variation and so teaspoons are more convenient than neaduring weight.
i think celsius is fun because you get to use negative numbers for freezing temperatures (useful as a canadian who grew up where it regularly gets to -20 or -30C in winters and 20 or 30C in summers) and i like the symmetry of that instead of 0-32F and -10F both being freezing?
Australian here, I am a generation or 2 past the introduction of the metric system and honestly for the most part it's just second nature, however there are a few holdout things that we use imperial measurements for (eg. the length of certain body parts) which perplexes me, but the metric is used for most things and it feels mostly accurate (although we do have those rulers with the measurement for imperial one side and metric the other).
"(eg. the length of certain body parts)" I just imagine that you just use a foot is a foot long haha
I well remember the switch from £/s/d money to £/p money. Many older people were worried about the change, but in practice the switch went through very smoothly and most of us were totally used in the new coinage within a few weeks.
Except a lot of prices (particularly at shops like greengrocers) practically doubled as traders changed the price from n d to n p.
One great thing about metric is weight and volumes are interchangeable, so long as you're measuring water or a fluid around the same density as water, ie 200ml of milk can just be weighed out as 200g if you can't find a measuring jug.
In the UK we don't need to give precise temperature information during the summer. We just state how many metres of rain is expected.
One minor advantage of using the metric system. If a recipe calls for 500ml of water then it is just so much simpler to weigh it .... ( 1ml = 1g )
1 pound of water in a US pint. One US pint is 16 fl oz. One cup is half a pound, not that hard of a conversion either.
@@loganleroy8622 US exceptionalism ... I am in the UK !
@@bonetiredtoo such a shame, oh well.
@@loganleroy8622 what is a cup tho?
If we go by a stick of butter being half cup and also weights 4oz, pound of butter would be 2 cups correct?
Since density of butter around 0.91 of water, that makes a cup around 250ml and definitely not half pound of water 227ml
@@harrytsang1501 Well I'm going by US Customary units. It's important to understand that fluid ounces are not the same as ounces. A cup of butter is 8 oz, a cup of water is 8 fl. oz. (which is 8.3 oz). If we're talking about baking, a difference of 8 grams is not going to make a difference for a cake you're baking. Any time that we actually need that kind of precision, metric is used. This is cooking we're talking about, not organic chemistry.
I've never understood the whole "temperature communication" issue. I hear it a lot, that it's so much easier to talk about 70's, 80's, and 90's ranges. But like... who does that? I've always given specific numbers. What's the temp today? 18 right now, high of 27. Easy. What's the weather like next week? Between 26 and 31. Easy. It's specific and quicker to describe than "in the high 20's to low 30's".
Also the conversion of C to F and F to C aren't that hard. F= (C*9/5)+32 and C= (F-32)*5/9. I'll use my favorite temp as an example 68F=20C.
F=(20*9/5)+ 32, F=(4*9)+32, F=36+32, F=68
C=(68-32)*5/9, C=36*5/9, C=4*5, C=20
Fun Fact -40F=-40C
On the other hand, I use the 10's - 60's, 70's, etc in conversation quite a bit to give a quick snapshot of a period of time. I find it especially helpful when thinking about what to wear. For instance, "it's going to be in the 70s next week" and I know I'll be in shorts and t-shirts as opposed to, "it's going to be in the 60's" where I'll probably need a layer if it's not sunny.
It's common in the U.S. to talk about ten degree temperature ranges. People will say "it's in the 60's", "low 70's", "high 80's, low 90's" etc and it's normal for U.S. news to do the same during weather forecasts. I think it makes some sense to do that when discussing Fahrenheit (since degrees F are relatively small, temperature readings are likely to vary somewhat more than Celsius.) But giving a specific number also makes sense, more so with Celsius.
I think that in Fahrenheit _or_ Celsius, temperatures tend to vary more than many people realize, both from hour to hour (or even half-hour to half-hour) and from one location to the next even within a few hundred yards (or a few hundred meters, if you prefer). That's also why I think the point about the Celsius system telling you when there might be ice on the roads is a little off; you can have icy roads at several degrees above 0 C, either because the air temperature was colder a half- hour ago, or because the ground temperature isn't quite the same as the air temperature, or because the temperature can vary by a few degrees from one point on the road to another.. I think the Fahrenheit system kind of encourages awareness of this, as you feel like you're getting into the "freezing range" of the thermometer before you actually get down to exactly 32.0 degrees.
Personally, for degrees Celsius, I do indeed say low/mid/high twenties. The problem comes in with the teens, which just sounds weird, so I tend to say "around 18" or "about 13" which both communicate similar ranges. Either that or "jacket weather" or similar.
You missed out on the coolest aspect of the A paper sizes.
The sheet A4 that results from halving an A3 has the same aspect ratio as the A3, everything from the A0 down to the smallest size they bother to make all have the exact same aspect ratio.
Now this might not immediately sound impressive, but it means that your graphic designer can make one design for the poster and then print it onto any size of paper without needing to adjust it. You just scale up the image and now it fits onto an A2.
This means that the poster outside the theater, and the front page of the program handout may well be the exact same image file just printed onto two different sizes of paper.
I LOVE your content! And since subscribing have watched all the videos and then also went back and watched some older stuff! Especially on Germany because I also lived there, before TH-cam existed!
I am an American who worked in optics for along time and we use metric exclusively. I also play a lot of Kerbal space program. Metric is objectively more user friendly.
I think a lot of people in the United States who bake more frequently then the occasional batch of cookies, are already measuring by weight using the metric system. In fact my favorite baking magazine always has the metric weight for the ingredients and I love it. The transition is already happening in small ways, and if the government took encouraging policy measures to move it along I think the US could go metric pretty quickly. People hate dealing with change because work can be annoying, but I think it will happen.
really? because in my country (germany), wherever there is more baking, the metric system is used less. if it's not baking for dummies, you quickly come across recipes with perceived units like half a cup or a heaping tablespoon. The more advanced the baking, the more ambiguous the recipes become.
damn bakers guild
they think they are something special 😅
I revert to imperial for baking; e.g 3 eggs, 6oz of butter, sugar and flour, or 4 eggs and 8oz of butter sugar and flour. That's so much easier to remember than 3eggs and 150g of everything else (and the ounces are easier to multiply up for a larger number of eggs)
@@nanabutner The size argument doesn't really make sense - Russia and China both use the metric system and the UK actually uses miles on road signs (probably why Evan still thinks in miles when he's driving).
That being said I don't think the US is going to switch any time soon. As you said metric is already used in science and engineering and in everyday life there's not really a big difference (it basically comes down to personal preference/what you're used to), but switching would be costly - most road signs would need replacing and you'd need public information campaigns explaining how to convert between them. Plus in the current political climate it would totally turn into a weird culture war thing.
No one that cooks using weights is using imperial. I go back and forth myself, but usually use volume
Australia started in the 1970s and was finished by the mid-1980s. By the time I started primary school, the conversion had been complete for a couple of years. A determined president could get half the job done in the US by the time they left office and their successor would just be left with the tail end of a handful of slow industries converting the last of their historical records, where it wouldn't be worth the trouble of trying to stop it. Sell it to the public as a way to stimulate the economy during a downturn.
At 7:40 you are holding a scale in your hand, a balance ⚖️ is used to measure the mass/weight of something. A scale is placed on the balance to determine the units of mass. A scale can also be a ruler 📏 or measuring tape. Or anywhere else you need to define the units or scale of something.
Digital scales are used for weighing things.🤷 Scale can also mean the device used to measure, not just the counter-weight.
Also, he's holding a block of butter in his hand, not a scale or weight...
Your point about personal perspective is not only valid but an important observation. I’m British, 53 years old, I was taught metric not imperial measurements at school, but I still use imperial for work (I’m a GP Surveyor, so I tend to use £ per square foot rather than £ per square metre) and if I go to my local butcher’s I will ask for 3 pounds of mince because I visualise it better than just under 1.5 kg of mince, or 3 bags of 454 grams each.
It’s also interesting that Fahrenheit and Celsius were developed within 20 years of each other in the early 18th Century.
This is so funny to me, I was born in the 90s and we were only taught metric but all my visualisation for weight is around a 1kg bag of sugar lol
In England we still use miles but also kilometres, plus acres and hectares, then there is weight - 14 pounds = 1 stone, 8 stones = 1 hundredweight (112 pounds), 20 hundredweights = 1 ton (2240 pounds). Rod, pole, perch or chain = 22 yards then 10 chains squared = 1 acre and 64 acres = 1 square mile. All very simple.
😂😂 "simple"
Not quite right. 1 acre = 1 chain x 1 furlong = 22yds x 220yds. 640 acres = 1 sq. mile
It might be kinder to others to admit that very few people in the UK even know Rods, Poles or Perches and they might only know a Chain in relation to a cricket pitch. People might also have a better idea of acres in context, a half acre field or 100 acre wood, etc. than know the precise measurement in chains.
@@rickconstant6106 Whoops missed the nought, thanks.
It’s true that you adapt over time. I remember the change over of currency in the 70s and at first everyone would convert metric back to imperial to work out what things cost but after a couple of years people got used to it. It was most difficult for the elderly, my grandmother refused to change and would always ask “what is that in real money?” I have also noticed that weather forecasters rarely convert low temperatures to Fahrenheit but often give high temperatures in Celsius followed by the equivalent Fahrenheit because it sounds more.
Speaking of adaptation to a new currency, most European had to adapt to Euros back in 2002. Prices were noted in both the older and new currency for the longest time. (We also ended up being lightly screwed up when price was rounded up to the higher number, but that's a different story).
I'm not saying Euros are definitely "better" than whatever currency we had before (it depends on the country, really), but it was a pretty huge change. I was just a kid when it happened, so I don't even do the comparison anymore, but I think my parents don't either, now, 20 years after the facts. It's not really meaningful anymore
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 That reminds me, I read recently that polls found that a surprisingly large amount of elderly people in the Netherlands (and probably other euro countries as well) still convert prices to the old currency when they want to know how much something costs.
So like "10 euros -> 22 guilders" and "35 euros -> a little over 70 guilders".
I knew of adults doing this in the 00s, but it blew my mind that so many people still do this about 20 years after the switch.
But then another realization blew my mind even more. If you keep converting euros to the old currency, your sense of what the old currency is worth will likely change along with inflation. That means that the intuitive sense of value that these people have is based on an imaginary value of an old currency, which is lower than any value that the old currency has ever had, historically.
In other words, they are converting to a currency that makes intuitive sense to them, but that doesn't correspond to any "real" value of that currency. It's just a mental model. One that does work, but requires calculation for you to use it. It's kinda wild.
@@raizin4908 That is an excellent point actually. I never thought of that!
Also fun fact about the paper sizes, Aside from A sizes we also have a bit bigger B sizes and C sizes.
The B size is an "in-between" for example B4 is between A4 and A3. it also follows the same ratio of 1:√2 as A sizes where you can put 2 B4 sheets to get an B3.
The C sizes are the sizes of envelopes used to send A sized paper. and has the same ratio as A and B formats
Surely the cup, spoon measurements etc, are a throwback to the days when the average household did not have scales to measure quantities. We here in the UK used cup/spoon measures way back in the day!
Some people still use that old method when cooking and baking!
we use coffe spoons (wery small), salt spoon (betwen coffe and tea spoon), tea spoon (approx 20ml), dinner spoon (30ml), cups (250ml).
In Poland it's very popular to use glasses and spoons in recipes, but a) recipes that require ultra precision use grams, b) you can just look up how many grams and mililitres of something an average glass holds. And then you can do weight measurements without a scale!
For a long time the purchase of stair carpet was metric for length and imperial for width. In its defence, there was a lot of older properties with stairs constructed with an imperial width.
That's still most staircases in every industrialized country. Tires are also specified in a mix: millimeter mounting width, a ratio for the sidewall height, and an inch size for the wheel.
There is another metric/imperial anomaly which is a little less scientific and more psychological. I have noticed that people like to express hot cold the weather is in Centigrade, and how hot it is in Fahrenheit. (Though the latter is being changed by the effects of global warming.)
I suspect that it is related to the nice round numbers involved. It is easy to say it's freezing because it's below zero centigrade, and until very recently feeling hot had the iconic 100F as a measure of extreme hot weather.
Unfortunately, global warming has made the temperature of boiling water, at approximately 100C, is now influencing this mind set. It is not uncommon to think about how hot our weather extreme has become as a fraction of 100C, or how far off we are from boiling our lakes and seas.
I am of an age, where I learned to understand speed, length and distance in imperial units, instinctively thinking in mph or miles, but I have a scientific background, so my working life was dominated by the rational units of SI, having the advantage of none of those unnatural conversion constants that imperial units produce.
2:33 From what I understand, Canada only really half converted to Metric, they still use the imperial picture frame and paper size and a person's height and weight are still Imperial as a few examples. They changed to Celsius and road signs to Km but kinda gave up fully converting most other things after 15 years of trying from 1970-1985
Pretty much bang on. People talking to their family or friends will express their height and weight in imperial. If they are applying for government issued ID, they have to give it in metric, unless the clerk knows the conversion. The reason Canada didn't fully convert to metric is the federal government left it voluntarily for businesses. Businesses not wanting to spend extra money on training or equipment said nope not happening, also a lot of businesses would send their products to the US. If you want to know what units Canadians use for different instances just google "Canadian measurement flow chart.
Yards were used for distance mainly and only in in very specific niches for measuring length (like fabric, rope etc).