a defense of the imperial measurement system
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 พ.ย. 2021
- it's not as bad as people say it is (but it is still pretty bad)
the chart: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...
NIST handbook appendix C: www.nist.gov/system/files/doc...
Revised Unit Conversion Factors: www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoo...
Weights and Measures Act 1985 Schedule 1: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/...
see also:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenh...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolet...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_(un...
/ hbmmaster
conlangcritic.bandcamp.com
seximal.net
/ hbmmaster
/ janmisali
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this is largely a response to this joke video matt parker made in 2013 th-cam.com/video/r7x-RGfd0Yk/w-d-xo.html
hmm
We could always try reeducating the populace en masse...
Or perfectionists can just cope.
The PAIN of imperial units becomes unbearable when you do even primitive engineering. E.g. in SI force: N = kg*m/s^2, work: J = N*m, power: W=J/s. Check those out in imperial, all that zoo of variations and accompanying conversion constants. As a bonus, say, estimate the force exerted by a water stream of 1lb/s at 1ft/s. Does divisibility by 12 or 16 makes it easier?
Bringing back TH-cam video responses
I think you have missed that the UK system this is all based on has more units between a lot of these and they were used. Furlong and chain, for example. And stones in weight. We laugh at the US using pounds, we use stones and you ridiculously high numbers are massively reduced in the UK.
"Mass of a liter of water"
Diogenes walks into the room, holding one liter of Deuterated Oxygen-18 water: *BEHOLD, THE KILOGRAM!*
I laughed way harder than is reasonable for this joke
Or kim jong un walking in with one liter of heavy water (water with deuterium)
@@winterforlife Kim Jong Un might use that larger kilogram to claim he isn't fat!
Water evaporated, distilled, and deionized from the ocean
I can't believe he would snitch on the goldsmith like that
This chart is missing so many of the most used measurements in the US: blocks, football fields, over yonder’s, down-a-ways, go-thata-ways, hop-skip-and-a-jumps, ain’t-too-fars, outa-my-ways, and many others.
Around the corner and just over the hill
Then there is my favorite: Close enough for government work.
I am not sure what type of unit this is in.
@@TexasEngineer It's the formal definition of idgaf.
"Just-outside-of-(insert-major-city)"
A stone toss away
As my engineering professor says; imperial is fine as long as you’re not doing anything important
mmm you mean like going to the moon?
ps i know some metric was used but the bolts nuts welder rivits and evey thing that made and help make it was not metric some of the calculations were done in metric but only a bit of it
@@71midnight exactly! Or building the countries pride and joy aircraft. It’s reassuring when flying in a Boeing knowing it’s metric
@@ryanm.191 I think you may have miss read I am not that good at explaining some things I say all of the spaceship was made with imperial metric was only done with some calculations on the flight course and that's it
@Angelita Moore What do you mean? NASA uses exclusively metric and has done for 30+ years. Before that even then they still consistently used Metric to measure things such as heat on aircraft when accelerating into the atmosphere, length of certain parts, and etc.
@@axthla8435 @axethelad yes but everything that was used to make it was not metric this was in the 60's metric tools were very rare in the US at that time only a few thousand and and that was mainly in the automotive industry.
The cars that they drove to work
the tools that they used
the building that they were in
the engine components and thrust components
the carts and dollys
the effect of aerodynamics came from the Air Force as well as Boeing and Northrop and other Aviation companies
most of the parts were made in Imperial
you said it you self nasa uses exclusively metric and has done for 30 years well yes your right on that nasa did not exclusively use metric when they were first started sending spaceships Nasa uses far more Imperial than you might realize at that time it was mostly Imperial
For those who have always wondered whose massive feet we based the "foot" off of, try measuring a hefty work boot, which is more like what most people would have worn on a daily basis at the time. Nobody is barefoot when they want to measure something out.
Is there an equivalent Hefty Work Sandals? the hollands didn't leave us any :(
Yeah but Henry I normed it
So you're calculating with the King of England's boot.
My shoes are conveniently very close to one foot long. If yours are not, you just have to calibrate it. It is probably more useful to calibrate your pace, however.
It is very handy to get a rough approximation of how big something is at work by just carefully walking, or by using my thumbs. If I ever need to quickly make sure I'm not too off a measure, and I left my tape measure somewhere and I can't bother to pick it up, boom foot n thumb time
My feet are roughly 1'1⅜. So that's about 111.5% more.
Roughly, good enough for small measurements! But if I used my feet to measure longer things in US feet, I'd have to add a whole foot every 7.5ish of mine, or more precisely, 32 feet to each 277 of mine. ... _if_ I did the maths right, of course.
To be fair, barleycorns are actually still used in the present-day US.
They're hidden behind "shoe size," but the difference between any two consecutive shoe sizes is a barleycorn: 1/3 of an inch.
no fuckin way
In Europe, shoe sizes are a mess (probably also in other parts of the world, but idk): every shoe brand has the shoe sizes slightly skewed towards either bigger or smaller, meaning that you cannot use the size to accurately determine whether your toe will hit the end of the shoe or not. Sometimes the shoe size is also given in centimeters, but even that cannot be compared between brands because everyone seems to use the same conversion table instead of actually measuring anything.
It's like the size of the shoe has been measured in cm, that number was passed to someone else who in their head converted it to inches, passed to someone else who converted it in their head to cm, passed to someone else who in their head converted it to inches, passed to someone else who converted it in their head to cm, passed to someone else who in their head converted it to inches, passed to someone else who converted it in their head to cm,
only to be converted to the shoe size from the number that was left over after all those approximations during conversion.
@@hetsmiecht1029 In Japan we use exclusively cm for shoe sizes. You would think that would mean you could just measure your foot or one of your existing shoes and then order the same size, but somehow it manages to still be a huge ordeal to find shoes that fit properly. It never ceases to amaze how two different brands can make two shoes that are supposedly 27cm but one is way too big and the other is way too small.
Shoe sizes are objectively the worst measurement systems the world around. Some claim to increment based on fixed lengths (barleycorn, cm, in, or whatever you want to choose) that never seem consistent. Most are more like Celsius and Fahrenheit than Kelvin (why is a woman’s size *always* 1.5 sizes larger than a men’s??? Why is size 0 not a non-existent shoe??). Men’s, women’s, and children’s sizes rarely match up, even in the same systems. None of that even gets into width! We need some shoe (and in general clothing) size standardizations the world over way more than the US needs to completely drop customary.
@@ClementinesmWTF I mean, most of the world already uses cm for shoe sizes. But as Mari and Het Smiecht both mention, just because we size in cm doesn’t mean that this actually aligns to real-world consistency, because everyone defines how to measure the same dimensions differently.
I think an interesting quirk about Americans and the imperial system is how we don’t actually use miles to measure distance all that often, we use time! This is because the average highway speed limit in the US is generally around 60 miles per hour, or a mile a minute, making conversion really easy. So while the distance between NYC and Chicago is 790 miles, it’s more practical to say it’s a 12.5 hour drive
I never noticed that before, but you're definitely right, at least in comparison to how I personally conceptualize distance. It certainly seems as though most people are more comfortable referring to a trip as "two hours away", rather than "120 miles". I suppose looking at distance relative to time does somewhat bring it back into "human useable" terms. I have no idea what two hundred miles looks like but if I said it takes about 3.5 hours to drive, I would have a somewhat more grounded concept of the distance.
I wonder if this mentality is a vestige of when people used to refer to places as "three days" or "a fortnight" away.
That really isn't a measure of distance unless you're talking about two points on a highway though. People use time just as often to talk about time between places within a single city, except the average speed there is definitely not 60 mph.
In my experience Americans are actually much more likely to describe the distance between two places in miles compared to Brits. And that's actually completely independent of highway speeds. I would say something like "Well it's not very far but it's country roads, so takes about an hour". I have *no idea* of the miles, only the time.
(Oddly this only applies to driving. I know the distance when I'm walking, but if you're moving under your own power you 'feel' the miles in a completely different way)
I hate this
never thought of it but its actually pretty efficient
The weirder and more obscure the units sound, e.g. furlong and hand, the more likely it is that they're used by people involved in some way with horses
exactly my experience as well, the first time I heard about hands, it was from an equestrian.
And isn't it funny... that a foot is not obscure, but a hand is. Of course, d*cks are out of consideration because sizes vary a lot :D
Furlongs were used to measure sections of fields for farming and most of the world actually has an analogous unit of length in their traditional systems. Literally "furrow length".
@@logandarnell8946horses can't talk
My favorite quote about metric and imperial system goes like this:
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade-which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
😂😂🤣👍
How did your metric system save you during the War? Oh wait it didn't, America did...
@@kasper7574 if you look in the books, you'll realise that it was actually the US government that started and orchestrated WW2... read up on "The Horrors" by Oswen Wilde, 1948... he died 1 month after publishing the book...
Millilitre*
@@clear.5999 yeah sure...
I’m an American who moved to Canada, and it is infuriating. Imperial for measuring short distances and heights, metric for long distance. Celsius for the weather, Fahrenheit for cooking (the exact OPPOSITE of what it should be!) At least in the US we just have one system for the most part!
seriously! celsius feels like it's practically designed for cooking but is more annoying for ambient temperatures. also they tried to migrate to imperial for short distances but really didn't do very well, the reason metric is used for long distances is because it was mandated to be used in cars and on road signs and stuff
I find the metric system to be superior in every way except fahrenheit/celsius. Most people use temperature for food or for inside/outside temperature and especially for the latter Celsius just is too coarse. Sure it's nice knowing that sub 0 is freezing, but if that's really the only problem I can live with switching. Centigrade and Fahrenheit are just as arbitrary as each other. We could easily replace Kelvin with Rankine in the SI too (not that we should replace anything in the SI)
Canada's measurement system is totally ruined by its physical proximity to the US.
Why is weather measured in Celsius? Because the weather stations on local TV can freely use metric if they want, and so they do.
Why is cooking measured in Fahrenheit? Because historically there wasn't a good financial reason for manufacturers to sell a different kind of oven for the Canadian market, so Canada got all the ovens with Fahrenheit.
@@Unknownlight I just came here to say that!
@@unarei Nah. Very straightforward, once you start thinking in increments of 5 rather than 10.
Creator of “the chart” here; I never intended it to illustrate how ridiculous a system the English (length) units are, because I agree with your point: there is no actual system at all!
When I made the graph, I did so to get a better overview of historic and accidental relationships myself. The 6000 ≠ 6080 paths are in there deliberately, for instance, because those are two alternate definitions that have been used. The sibling weight chart has more of such cases.
By the way, did you publish your NIST chart to Wikicommons as well? It’s a nice and welcome addition.
Thanks for making it! It's really helping me out. Looking at it gives me a way more intuitive understanding of measures that I'm not familiar with, rather than having to pull out a calculator every time.
Yo.
Cool.:)
good idea! I've uploaded my chart there now. [ commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NIST_definitions_of_American_units_of_length.png ] I hope it can be of use to someone down the line!
Just goes to show how intentions are often lost over time, and especially on the internet. Kinda like with all these units nobody uses anymore.
@@HBMmaster Thanks, but I do suggest inverting the colours, since graphs on Wikipedia are black on white.
In catalan, we have an unofficial unit of measurement called a "hand" ("pam"), which was used quite often at least by our grandparents' generation.
A hand is commonly defined as 20cm, but the truth is that people just measured things with THEIR hands and got a number out of them. So if your grandma says that the table is "7 hands long", you actually have to take into account the size of her hand. What she's actually saying is "this table is 7 grandma hands long".
Essentially everyone had their own unique unit of measurement, in a very toki pona-like manner. Of course we use metric when any semblance of precision is required, but it isn't uncommon to say things like "he's two hands taller than me".
There were also a lot of people who knew the exact conversion between their hand length and metric, and could get scarily accurate measurements of things just by sizing them up with their hands.
For day-to-day measurement, this sort of thing just isn't an issue.
"Three by three feet of cloth" is pretty straightforward to visually understand, especially when you can SEE that the other guy's feet are smaller than yours and they're counting by THEIR feet, not yours.
You can (theoretically) do precision engineering and architecture with "arbitrary" measurements like this, as long as everyone on the team can check each-other's work. Big-Feet Tim can SEE he's got big feet, and ask Normal-Feet Nathan to help him measure. If you're working alone then you don't even need that.
As distances get bigger, that's when these systems of measurement break down. If you're sending goods or information a week down-river, how will those recipients know how big YOUR feet are? Do you send one of your shoes with the package?
Extend the differences further and things become hopeless. Now you're far enough away that even broad generalisations like "apple-sized" or "horse-sized" might not apply, because this region has different horses and different apples. That's assuming everyone's working in good faith, and you won't want to do that after the first time you buy "ten stones weight" of goods and discover that bastard was measuring with pumice.
@@Ninjat126 because your feet are 12 inch long? (us size 12 and 13 for women) My guess is that you just don't care
[insert Robot Wars joke involving Panic Attack here]
Here in Colombia (At least in the Caribbean) it is common to do that also! Just that a bit different... We use fingers: We measure things sometimes by putting our hand horizontally and counting how many fingers (Except thumbs) fits on the object's length. Maybe we use another thing to measure, like our foot or anything that's useful to see.
Obviously, this is NOT used when precission is required. This is just a "handy" way to measure things, since it's a bit more visual than saying "about 6 cm".
By the way, don't know why I'm writing this in English since we both speak Spanish (Probably).
No ve d'un pam nananana si esta fresca i eixerida no ve no ve no ve d'un pam
Barleycorns *are* still used, we just don't call them barleycorns any more. They're used to measure shoe sizes.
Just a note, a nautical mile has nothing to do with a typical mile. A nautical mile is the median arc length corresponding to one minute of latitude. Or 1/60th of a degree of latitude
I never knew that, always thought it was just a strange subset. TIL.
And a knot would be a nautical mile ("knot"-ical mile) per hour, or in other words an arcminute of latitude per hour.
@@rauhamanilainen6271 it used to be the distance between knots in a standard rope divided by the time it took the rope to get out of the ship when it was stuck by an ancor, I think
This highlights the point even further that imperial units were better at being subdivided, when there's a system of measurement that can be divided by 1, 2 ,3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10, not once, but twice (poor 7 lol)
@@dinamosflams Not quite. First off, in the good ol' days of sailing, they used to use a chip log (a flat board that would catch the water and would thus be stationary in the water) to measure speed. As the boat was moving, they would throw this over board, and then they would let the rope slip out and they would count knots set in the rope. The unit of "knot" does get its name from these knots, but the knots were set at precisely the distance required so they would translate directly into nautical miles per hour.
You might define a unit of weight as being equal to 7000 grains of barely because it was the volume of a commonly used shipping crate. Then it might turn out that it makes sense to reckon the volume of ships' holds in terms of the this customary unit, the amount of barley it can hold.
Usually there are reasons for things. Usually those reasons made more sense at the time.
barley?
Yup. Exactly.
Just like how we often today denote container ship sizes in "how many containers can it hold", TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit)
@@MarcusMedomRyding In like 200 years there's gonna be one of those charts like "omg did you guys know there's a unit called a container that's equal to 20 feet? Isn't that wacky!" The context of 20 foot containers being a good size to fit with all of our shipping, rail and trucking infrastructure might be lost as technology evolves. Metric units were designed artificially with the priority on a rationalist aesthetic and are obviously better for science as a result, meanwhile imperial units were designed for a specific use-case over a long period of time and generally prioritize function over clean conversions, they're not really comparable systems because they had different goals from the start.
In defense of water over barley, it is a resource that is necessary for human survival and therefore found/used in every human society. Whereas barley does not have this same advantage. Not gonna comment on why a liter of water tho
I'd like to add that I really appreciate how the Imperial system of lengths works for sewing, as someone who does a lot of that. Yes, the metric system is easier to multiply by 10, but you are not multiplying by 10 when sewing. You are dividing, specifically by two more than once, which gets Real ugly with 10, but is very nice with 36 and 12 and fractions of an inch! I like being able to divide inches when doing seams instead of having to work in arbitrary numbers of millimeters (too precise), or numbers of centimeters (not precise enough). like you got 1" 5/8" 1/2" 3/8" 1/4" 1/8". very directly related to each other. all the precision you need. easy to remember. Also easy to standardize for different "types" of things you're sewing: clothes are 5/8" or 1/2" seam, accessories like purses are 1/2" or 3/8", quilts are 1/4", and French seams are 1/8". You can remember that and use it when you don't have a pattern to work directly off of.
Yards and fractional yards are also really convenient to work off of when buying fabric: inches turn into fractional yards really really nicely. You can take a 5'4'' measurement for a cloak, which is 64'' just by remembering the multiples of 12 (remember your times tables? i learned those in 3rd grade), which is 1 and 2/3 yards! Very easy to remember and go to the fabric store and buy the right amount of fabric (though i would round it up to 1 3/4 yards just to be safe).
I dunno. I think that being able to use a system that's really well optimized for some things is better than having to use something that's optimized for something else just to appease some nonexistent god of Consistency and Objectivity. Sure, the metric system is absolutely better for scientific measurements, but it is foolish to say that we are purely scientific beings. We are humans who have feet and digits and for the vast majority of our existence had no decimal system, no calculators, no easily accessible paper and pencil, and no idea what "universal constants" were, and the Imperial system shows that. In addition to all the completely valid reasons not to like the Imperial system, perhaps that is one reason people don't like it. But then again, who knows- I'm just a random person in the comments section of a TH-cam video.
I’m a carpenter and something that is useful about imperial is that you can easily deal in thirds. It’s convenient and quick to measure out a third in imperial every standard measure is divisible by 3
Ever heard of tenth?😂
@@19mike88 ten is not divisible by 3. Can you explain what you mean?
@SeaPrismUnderwear yeah, I meant that metric is divisible per 10. 10 decimeter is 1 millimiter, 10mm is 1 cm, 10 cm is 1 decameter... it's simpler and more accurate to divide per 10th than 3
@@19mike88 yes that is simpler for sure, but my point is there are certain scenarios where you need to be dividing by 3 and an even division like 10 or 2 won’t work. Stuff like stud layouts, concrete forms, light fixtures across a ceiling, drywall cut outs. Having thirds makes all of these go smoother, a small advantage for the imperial system but an advantage none the less.
@SeaPrismUnderwear mmm ok, but maybe those things are divisible per 3 because simply they were built using imperial.(i don't know the things you pointed out so i might be wrong)
For people who want to know why there are 5280 feet or 1760 yards in a mile, it is because of a compromise, and standardization from around 13th century England. Official unit systems historically were always a _legal_ standardization of what people were using and came up with themselves (evolutionary developed, not designed) that they found useful. So when the first English standardization happened, they had to settle on the definition of the English foot, which they defined in relation to the (legacy) Saxon foot. The English foot was defined to be 10/11 of the Saxon foot. But this then meant that the new hypothetical English mile would be 10/11 of the old amount, and the cost of changing all the road signs (yes, even back then) would be too much. The original Saxon mile was defined as 1600 Saxon yards or 4800 Saxon feet (why this was chosen requires a little more of a history lesson). So instead of changing all the road signs and maps etc, they just changed the definition of the mile to be 11/10 (10%) larger, and that's where the 1760 (1600 + 160) yards and 5280 (4800 + 480) feet comes from for the definition of a mile.
Oh, I thought the 1760 number just came about from units in between feet, yards and miles that had smaller numbers (eg IDK… 28) that were forgotten - eg furlongs?
You telling me that the metric system is the single most successful conlang ever conceived?
@@iamthinking2252_ : When the English mile was standardized, it was set to be a whole number (8) of furlongs (660 feet), because the furlong was a well-established unit, and nobody wanted to screw up all the existing property records that measured land in furlongs.
A furlong is "a furrow long", i.e., the length of a trench made by a plow in a farm field. Because there's only so much distance a farmer could plow before he had to rest his oxen. The furlong was ultimately standardized at 10 chains, or 40 rods.
A "rod" is 16.5 feet. This makes no sense with the modern foot, but in old Saxon units it was a nice round 15 feet.
Interesting.
Thank you.
@@danielbishop1863 you've got it backwards. A furlong was 600 saxon feet, therefore it would become 600+60 English feet. And then a furlong was still 1/8 of a mile.
Nautical miles are actually a great unit for navigation. It's 1 arc minute of lattitude. You can go straight from nautical miles to latlong coordinates
"Ocean Miles."
And that's really useful! On sea. Not on ground.
@@hyperball01 Just like this video shows; the units themselves are only useful depending on context
Niche units are fine. The problem is when niche becomes mainstream - it might not be ideal :)
@@hyperball01 Nobody uses nautical miles on ground
I know I'm a year late to this video, but in the meantime studying physics has made me gain an even grater appreciation of the metric system. The biggest problem with the imperial system is not conversion between different units of the same physical dimension (which I get that Americans don't do), but conversion between different dimensions. In the SI system of measurement, the unit of force is the Newton, which is defined based on the other base SI units as 1 N = 1 kg*m/s^2. Given this relation, it's really easy to derive a force from a mass and an acceleration, plus, even if you are given some measurements in a multiple of a specific unit (like being given a mass in grams instead of kg), it's easy enough to convert to their base units for your final calculation. This cannot be done easily in the imperial system, as, for example, the imperial unit of force most commonly used is the pound-force, lbf, where 1 lbf = 32.2 lbs*ft/s^2, so in any calculations involving force, mass and acceleration, you are required to convert your units. You might say that the imperial system also has the poundel, where 1 pdl = 1 lbs*ft/s^2, mimicking the relationship that exists in metric between the Newton and the base units, but, disregarding the fact that the poundel is not widely used, the unit of pressure is still the pound-per-square-inch, which refers to the pound-force, requiring you to do a conversion. Dimensional analysis is an incredibly useful tool in physics to see if you've messed up a calculation, and the metric system just makes it so much easier to do.
I agree but also all the really good physics has no units at all
.....People are not rocket scientists. You'll probably find more construction workers and regular people then people who spend their life studying advanced mathematics, science and physics.
At the same time, in engineering it is indescribably convenient to have your unit of force be the same quantity as your unit of mass times the acceleration of gravity which is something that gets lost a lot: metric is a system created in a vacuum where as imperial is a system created in practicality
more commonly i think i see the imperial system being made coherent the other way around, keeping the lbf as the unit of force and instead defining the unit of mass as 1 slug = 1lbf / (1ft/s^2)
The fathom, 6 feet, is based on the approximate average male arm span. This is useful when measuring the depth of water with a rope with a weight on the end, pulling it up hand over hand. I delight in this.
I think this is an instance of a larger problem where people conflate "the difference between X and Y is extremely obvious" and "the difference between X and Y is extremely large"
i think the difference is extremely large imperial sucks
@@linkhidalgogato what makes you say it sucks? So long as people clearly understand what is being represented by a measurement its working fine
@@mutantcube1737 i mean if ur bar is set that low then yeah i guess even the imperial system would meet your standards
@@linkhidalgogato wdym man? All units are arbitrarily defined based on their context of use. Metric was defined for the lab, customary units were defined based on quantities people regularly use in daily life. Don't forget why we want standardized units in the first place, it's all about making it easier to share information. That's really the only criterion for a successful system of measurements.
@@tissuepaper9962 metric wasn't design for the lab it was design to be easier to use and it is
its not just about having standard units its about having sensible and easy to use units
You know why the French adopted the metric system? (They didn't invent all of it)
It's because they had over 400 sets of definitions of weights and measures. There was Parisian pound and lyonnaise pound, this foot and that foot and yet another 399 feet definitions. Each town had one. Same of course for ounces, inches and so on.
So instead of trying to unify all that, they cut the Gordian knot and got rid of all of it.
I think the British did just something similar their imperial system when they got rid of their Winchester system
@@jmurray1110 you again? Lol
As a french person I agree
And plus the entire world adopted these measurements because it was way more practical than converting between different units in each country. And that's the main advantage of the metric system, that it's universal and makes people not use conversions. Not just that it's more logical. That's what Americans don't understand, it was impractical to convert between a thousands different units so everyone switched to the universal standard. Everyone except them which still hold on to their outdated legacy units.
Wait what they did invent it
And they were the first to fully adopt it
In a surveying class I took for my Civil Engineering degree we had to learn all sorts of obsolete units of distance measurements "just in case". I never did any surveying outside of that class but from what I learned surveyors need to know these units because they might come across a measurement that was recorded in older units.
Depending of the state surveying in the US has metric, international inch(1961) or customary inch (18xx)
Numberphile once did a video on why a system with 12 digits would be superior to our system with ten, it boils down to the same advantage you mention for the imperial system: 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5, making it much more useful for intuitive divisions.
Watch "a better way to count" by jan Misali
10 is just more intuitive for humans though. We start counting by using our fingers and we generally have 10 of those. Once that is in place, it makes more sense to make our systems based on the number 10.
@@Jake007123 I feel like 12 isn’t so unintuitive
A dozen is a pretty nice unit if I do say so myself
@@NotFine My point was more about how very intuitive the number 10 is, more than 12. Twelve is a good number too, it's just that ten is much better.
@@Jake007123 The only reason you find 10 more intuitive is because your entire life you grew up with a number system that is base 10, so your brain thinks im base 10. There are tons of number systems that have existed, and still exist around the would that don't use 10 as their base for continuing
The way you constantly clarify how the metric system is still better has big "please don't hit me" energy
He didn't want to get the Salem Witchhunt treatment. 😂
Bcuz ppl online are still making comments that just say "metric better"
Fun fact:
Having a separate unit for temperature is itself completely arbitrary. If you fix the Boltzmann constant as 1, you get temperature in terms of Joules. Some statistical physics books actually do this.
Doesn't the zeroth law of thermodynamics rely on/define temperature as an intrinsic parameter though? (or whatever it's called, my thermodynamics isn't very good)
But units are good! You don't want to measure temperatures in Joules, or distance in seconds (if you set the speed of light as 1), because then you lose the ability to check that your computation gets you something with the right units.
That is, unless you're some weird theoretical physicist.
@@blank4305 all of those units are still ultimately defined based on c though. I don't really see the difference TBH.
@@blank4305 You can get back the units in SI/CGS for every result you get by inserting whatever combination of c, hbar, kb and G you need to get them. For example, in c=G=1 units the Schwarzschild radius of an object of mass M is R = 2M. However, you know you want R in meters and M in kg, so R = (G/c^2) * 2M is your ticket.
Wait so what would a 20°C day be in Joules?
6:08 I think this is the whole crux of why users of either system have trouble understanding or adapting to the other one. Users of the imperial system avoid conversion, work around it or prefer to work by halving their measuments leading to fractions such as 1/16 or 1/32 while the metric system outright depends on the conversion for it to work. When a metric user has to get a quarter of a meter they commonly "convert", or more accurately change, the scale of their unit to centimeters to get 25cm instead of 0.25m. When the number starts to get inconvenient for daily use, metric users just dynamically switch the scale which is likely a foreign way of thinking for imperial users. On top of that, the concept of working by halving isn't really a common way to work in the metric system which might be awkward for people who are used to that method.
The two systems are almost polar opposites in their everyday use which makes grasping the other side's view hard. They utilise different methods. You can't use the metric system like you'd use the imperial one and vice versa. If you treat the suffixes of the metric system as their own independent units you're immediately doing it wrong just if you'd try to mix and match feet and miles in the imperial system. You can't just switch the units without also switching the way you use the units.
We work similarly to a certain degree. We say half liters and not 50cl. Or half a meter and not 50 cm. In fact if we wanted to be more accurate we would say 1 cubic decimeter and not 1 liter.
But yeah. You are right that we easily change scientific prefixes depending on the convenience. 20 cm instead of 0.2 meters. 2 kilometers instead of 2000 meters since we are taught that since primary school. Very good observation.
@@hodb3906 The funny thing is that in American schools we are now taught all kinds of history and reason the metric system is better, but we aren't actually taught nearly as much about the imperial system our lives are dependent on. Current curriculums are clearly biased to make the younger generations want the metric system instead of the imperial system. But it just makes our lives more difficult. Why do I need to know how a meter was defined, but not taught how a mile was defined? We might be taught that a mile is a Roman mile, maybe even that a Roman Mile was 1000 paces as mentioned in this video. But what is a pace? Is it arbitrary based on how long your legs are? Is it counted by each foot hitting the ground? No. A Roman Pace was a standardized measurement. Counted on the left foot hitting the ground, at infantry marching speed. Meaning that while in formation marching, every 1000 times your left foot hit the ground, you traveled 1 Roman mile with very little inconsistency. The entire system was based around the practicality of being able to measure without tools.
Also the term "milestone" comes from the fact that on Roman paved roads they placed a particular stone at 1 mile intervals. On each of these stones was a number indicating how far from Rome you were. This is also where we get the idiom "all roads lead to Rome" as all paved roads in fact did lead to Rome.
@@abonynge As far as I know all US customary units are based on SI (metrical) units (and have been for decades). So why should it matter how they were defined in the distant past?
@@abonynge So you're complaining that the school system is trying to teach you the better system, and explain to you why it's better, instead of teaching you the stupid system that literally only still exists because americans can't admit that something they do isn't perfect?
@@harmless6813 The same reason the way the metric system was previously defined matters. It is no longer measured by things like the circumference of the Earth. But we are still taught that because it helps people understand the basis of the measurement system.
With metric it actually matters less than it does with imperial. With the imperial system most measurements are anthropic, meaning you can use your body parts to get a rough estimate. The inch is around the width of the average male thumb. In many languages the word for inch is still the same as the word for thumb. The foot was initially the measure of the average male's shoed foot. Materials to make shoes have improved so they are thinner than in the past, its roughly equivalent to a size 14 US sneaker. You are supposed to be able to get an estimate of feet by walking heel to toe in shoes. The list goes on, but knowing these things does find use in every day life for many people.
Thank you, this was actually very informative!
As an engineer I have a mixed relationship with whether the US should switch or not. Switching would make it consistent with the rest of the world and make measuring things a lot nicer (for instance, I'm taking thermodynamics and 1 Pascal is defined as 1N/m^2, which is very helpful for keeping track of units). However, the process of switching would be pretty painful for those already attuned to using imperial. It would take me a while to understand how far a km is or how hot a degree celsius is in day-to-day life.
Basically, I wish we would have switched to metric when the rest of the world did.
you know that metric is not that old, and at one point in the 20th century, the whole world passed to this process of switching, right? like, THE WHOLE WORLD MADE THIS EFFORT TO HAVE JUST ONE SYSTEM OF MEASUREMENT IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, and just americans were like "yeah, but no".
and to me, this would be fine if the USA didn't export products around the world. So I have to buy a TV that is 55 inches, a cellphone that is 5,5 inches... Some products have 5 oz. I don't even know how to translate oz to portuguese. I don't know if this is a word or an abbreviation. I don't want to know because my country made the effort to switch at one point in time. people complained people weren't used to the new way, and things get confusing, but in a short time everyone knew how to use metrics and we just forgot about the other methods.
but them we buy something from the USA and nothing makes sense anymore.
@Edson Vinícius Santos Vaz Ronque so if you're getting products from the US with Oz on it, it also has the metric equivalent posted on the product. Everything in my kitchen with an imperial unit on it has the metric listed as well. So there is no way you're confused by a product you got from the US. Also not knowing how big a 55" TV is is pretty unimportant.
It would also be incredibly EXPENSIVE. Just imagine how many hundreds of thousands of road signs would need to be changed or reprogrammed in metric. Speedometers in the US read primarily in MPH (analogue dials sometimes have smaller KmH denotation, but often digital gauges only read MPH, cars might require software upgrades). Food packaging would have to change where it's not already in liters or grams (yes Americans use those in grocery stores sometimes-in fact our nutritional labels are in metric).
That's ignoring public resistance to changing the way they go about their daily lives!
Metric would be vastly improved if it were base-10 instead of base-10.
Nah base-10 is way better
@@yoavboaz1078 fool, base-10 is the best, and way better than base-10
I prefer base 6. I mean bijective seximal, of course.
@@felipevasconcelos6736 haha sex
We should use base-17 because the extreme inconvenience will make everyone work slower and therefore more carefully.
also the whole teaspoon->tablespoon->cup->pint->quart->gallon progression is essentially a microcosm of this, since with the exception of like quarts and gallons all those units are largely independent in usage. If something is measured in cups, you just say "two cups" instead of switching to pints. If something is measured in tablespoons, you would just say "four tablespoons" rather than a quarter-cup. It's a system which is good for cooking (what most people most commonly use volume measurements for), since it's easy to get an intuition for how much each individual unit is, and follow/adjust recipes based on that. Plus, a volume system based on powers of 2 is more easy for a person to approximate without measuring than one based on powers of 10, and a system based on pre-set values which you already have vessels for is quicker to use precisely than one which you measure with a scale. Not a super high *degree* of precision, but you don't need that in cooking.
It does immediately fall apart if you try to use it in any other context, though.
i gonna have to dissagree on the independent thing. I work at a kitchen and we often are sharing our measuring cups and buckets, so it becomes really difficult when the recipe ask for 1 1/2 gallons of water and the only thing you have are in quarts.
You need precision for baking though, which is the branch of cooking that relies the most in measuring stuff. Besides, the fact that a tablespoon of brown sugar has a different weight than a tablespoon of white sugar is the most inconvenient thing ever. Maybe in 1840 it was useful, but modern people have digital scales. Having those different spoons to measure is proof that you need special tools to make imperial have any sense. It could be just as easy to have those spoons in metric: 5ml, 15 ml, and so on. But we normally don't have those because it's not necessary in my opinon.
@@jmiquelmb I'm genuinely curious, when has the weight of a tablespoon of brown sugar vs white sugar been a problem for you? I haven't come across a recipe that has that problem.
@@aliceiscalling When you want to change white sugar for brown sugar, or the opposite, since you want to keep weight, and tablespoons are a measure of volume. Same for castor sugar vs granulated sugar, and many other ingredients. Using volume to measure solids is incredibly cumbersome.
@@jmiquelmb Thank you! I'm the kind of person who doesn't switch out ingredients, so I never encountered that before.
The strongest defense for imperial system: it is NOT a system, just chaos.
Each unit of measure is perfectly fine for the area it was designed for. Not chaos at all.
If you are watching an American football game for instance it is all yards feet and inches.
If you are driving, who cares about feet and inches, it is just miles and tenths of miles - it is actually weird when a GPS switches to yards for something coming up.
If you are in printing it is picas, points and mils - no miles needed at all.
Each measurement is perfect for what it is used for, but if for some weird reason you wanted to no how many points a football field is, the measurement seems stupid.
Is there any reason we absolutely have to have one single unit of measure?
"And ya know the thing about chaos... it's fair."
@@abrandenburg10 lmao i just finished that trilogy of movies today
@@bitset3741 Literally couldn't have said it better myself. Imperial is different, sure, but I hate nothing more than entitled Euros trying to shove their system of measurement down my throat.
And as a slight tangent, a history lesson! Did you know that the Metric system also has a unit of time, ranging from seconds to years, and a full blown religion? Yes, there is an official Metric religion, and it's called the Cult of Reason.
@@bitset3741 you say that like Metric can't do any of that, the difference is that metric just easily converts between units
I'm an engineer in America, and one of the great pains in my life is dealing with converting between energy and power units in my job. In college we're taught both metric and imperial together, and in that context, it becomes excruciatingly clear how awful and mish-mashed the imperial "system" truly is. I agree it's not quite as bad as some of its detractors who've never used it say, but in a technical environment, it is just awful.
One of the worst things is that we measure all our electricity in Watts, but we measure thermal power for things like heat pumps, air conditioning, and water heaters in BTUs (technically, the analog would be BTU/h, but I'll just use BTU for short). Problem is, all these BTU-based thermal devices are often _powered_ by electricity, _and_ we have natural gas power plants (and the energy density of NG is measured in BTUs) _generating_ Watt-based electricity, so we are converting between the two units constantly. BTUs are the most arcane bullshit unit ever conjured, and they're not consistent from medium to medium or even temperature to temperature. It's like if you took a Calorie and put two big question marks at the end of it.
The whole thing is a mess and it's about time they just scrapped everything and converted to SI. I sooooo miss dealing with shit like Joules, where the conversion to Watts is literally just to divide by time in seconds. Why can't we have nice things?!
A note on cables and fathoms:
These are units designed to measure rope for fitting out a sailing ship and for sailing the ship with a crew who mostly have little-to-no formal education outside of practical matters related to their profession.
A fathom originated as the distance between your hands when outstreched. If you've ever coiled rope you'll know that stretching your arms out and then brighing them back in while holding the rope is a very neat and efficient way of making a coil or taking a measure of said rope. Given the average dimensions of a human, this figure comes out to around 6 feet, but historically standards varied by as much as a foot in either direction. Depending on where and when you are this may have been as short as 5.5 feet or as much as 7 feet, but given time and practice (both in abundance at sea) your common sailor would be able to work out about how much slack to give or take to come close enough to the standard at the time for most purposes, and anything that requires precision such as water depth or speed would be measured with a pre-marked line.
A cable length is originates as literally the length of the ship's anchor cable. Again exactly how many fathoms of cable you would need for this and how long a fathom is varied with time and place, which is why this unit doesn't fit well into most versions of "the chart". If you were to ask the United States Navy, they will tell you that a cable is 120 fathoms. In the Royal Navy a cable is 101 fathoms. In practice, this discrepancy doesn't really matter.
In short, like the rest of the "imperial system" these units have a specific application, work intuitively within that application and were never intended to be used for much else.
Wow, this seems....
"unfathomable."
I use fathoms in every day life, and I am not a sailor. No special reason, fathoms are a good unit.
So these units are basically "whatever, we'll fix it in post". Makes sense.
Fun fact, while we don't have a 30 cm lenght unit, most of us who grew in metric countries can probably visualize that lenght without subdividing the meter because the rulers you use in school are exacly 30cm long, i'm guessing people who grew up in imperial countries had the full foot?
Also we do say 30cm, no one uses decimeters, or decameters or hectometers. Much like miles and feet we almost never convert opting instead to use decimal point to increase precision at first.
Here in Ireland metal rulers are usually metric (30cm) and wooden ones are almost always metric on one side and imperial on the other. Tape measures are sometimes metric and more commonly both.
in the US, our school rulers have both metric and empirical on em and are generally only a foot/~30cms long lol
well decimeters are used in sweden semi frequently...
Exactly what I was thinking, although I would say metric prefixes always refer to a multiple of 1000 (eg kilo, mega, giga, micro, nano ...) with the exception of centi. So we would say 900m not 0.9km and 8km not 8000m
Huh, is this why subway subs are either 30cm or 15cm long? Nice! 😊
It sounds better than imperial bc why would i want a foot 🦶🏼👣👞 in my sandwich ?? 🥪🤨📸
7:20 As a surveyor, this makes me so happy to finally have an answer to a question I never bothered to ask.
What is the origin of a rod. They measure portages in rods for some reason
@jasonwiley798 I couldn't tell you the origin. However, it's just a unit of measurement in the same line as statute mile and chain. Supposedly the average canoe is 1 rod long. Call it a vestigial unit that still has some relevancy.
In the Philippines we have become accustomed to utilizing both the SI and the US Imperial systems, partly as a result of past US rule in the country. The two systems are used side-by-side in everyday usage but for different applications. Even the spelling of SI units follow US English convention (e.g. "meter" instead of "metre")
We weigh things like groceries, produce and construction materials in kilograms, but the weight of people is expressed in pounds. Similarly, people's heights are measured in feet and inches, but lengths of objects and distances are measured in meters and kilometers. We use the phrase "six-footer" (>183 cm) to describe someone taller-than-average, and we like to eat "quarter-pounder" (~113 g) burgers at fast food stores. We refill our drinking water by the gallon but gas by the liter.
this actually makes sense is is really in the spirit of the imperial system, just using measurements for specific things that makes sense
@@GhostofTradition I think the US measurement system is better for more "casual" (i.e. non-scientific) applications or for measuring people, and metric for everything else. It's simply awkward and cumbersome to say something like a "one hundred eighty centimeter-er" instead of "six footer," for example, because one does not really need to be precise in referring to tall people. Other phrases and figures of speech such as "go the extra mile," "pound for pound," "the whole nine yards," convey their meaning much better as American units, without the need for people to consciously think of the metric equivalents to understand those phrases.
@@vigilurbis3394 we just say one eighty meters
Here in Chile we also have quarter pounds
@vigilurbis3394 No offense but the examples you gave aren't very strong, in my opinion. Those are all just sayings that include these measurements because of the US's historical ties to the imperial system. But that doesn't prove in any shape or form that it's better or it "makes more sense". Especially when you realise that there are other languages in the world that aren't english, so even though "one hundred and eighty centimeters" sounds clumsy and long, other languages might express the same thing shorter. Plus then there's how most everyday speech omits unnecessary parts (such as the "metre" postfix because "centi" by itself is enough, or sometimes even the whole thing goes out the window, making the speakers rely on context).
With these two factors in mind, Spanish people clearly don't say "él mide ciento-ochenta centímetros", but "mide ciento-ochenta" or something, with the two o's bleeding into each other, further shortening the sentence when spoken. Or Hungarians don't say "száznyolcvan centiméter magas" ("he's a hundred and eighty centimetres tall"), but "száznyolcvanas" ("he's a hundred-eightier") or "egy-nyolcvan magas" ("he's one-eighty tall").
Bottom line is, whatever may sound bad in english doesn't necessarily sound bad in some other language. Plus, sayings are just... sayings. My native tongue is Hungarian and we have a bunch of sayings referring to times when people carved lines into wooden sticks to take note of sums of money but that doesn't mean we use/should use those.
As a stormwater engineer, I find it necessary to point out that 1 ac-in/hr of rain is roughly equivalent to 1 ft^3/s. So if you know the watershed area in acres, and the average rainfall in inches/hour, both of which are common measurements for those things, you have found the flowrate in cubic feet per second and I think that's neat.
To be ultra-precise, an acre-inch is 3630 cubic feet. Since an hour is 3600 seconds, an acre-inch per hour is 1.008333... cubic feet per second.
@@danielbishop1863 the conversion is 1 within three sig figs so for most practical purposes yes he does know.
This works in Metric extremly well as well.
Rainfall is given in mm/m² which is l/m². If you just add a time unit ontop you have your flowrate.
This works great for scaling issues.
Got a few km² of rainfall, just multiply the km² Number and add a factor of 10^6 and you got your complete Liters. If you want m³ then you just add 3 zeros or a factor of 10^3.
That is what i like about the metric system. If just scales well.
43560:43200
@@danielbishop1863 yeah but in practical physics it usually doesn't matter to that degree of precision so it's ok xD
one thing that i think is important to understand about the imperial measurement system ( as it exists in the US ) is that a lot of these convoluted and meaningless relationships were inexpicably things you were meant to learn in school ( in particular the mile/foot thing ) - which ends up making them reviled by young adults
not reviled enough apparently
It's especially bad in Canada where you're often forced to learn the conversions between Imperial and Metric on top of that.
the problem is there are people who actually defend the imperial system and
this guy singlehandedlg bogged down efforfs to replace the imperial system as a "joke". As someone who has majored in sociology and the studies of political activism online, and having been features on the news many times, people do not believe me that when they make controversial
videos as a "joke", they are actually ignorant to the fact that the idea isnt as controversial as the idea theyre attacking
that's what happens when you value "rigor" over usefulness
They taught me standard better than they taught me metric, and at a younger age too. USA be wack.
I just want to let you know that the little details in your vids, the dark mode especially, don’t go unappreciated. Keep up the great work 👍
I find it interesting that in England, we use metric almost entirely but most people will use the imperial system when measuring height or weight of a person and we tend to measure speed and lomg distances in miles/mph. I don't know how common this is, but my family also prefers to bake in ounces.
Baking in ounces isn't very common these days, especially for younger people. But measuring jugs and spoons generally have both, but the spoons are indexed to metric (i.e. you will have a 10ml spoon and not a 2 tbsp spoon)
The word "mile" sounds a lot better than "kilometers". Kilometer sounds cold and artificial and the pronunciation does flow like mile does.
@@richardbloemenkamp8532in Sweden we have metric miles (10 km)
@@richardbloemenkamp8532define artificial in this context
Interesting - in Canada we use km/h, but we have the same issue for cooking (even worse, our ovens are in F, outside temp in C.) And height (I know my height in imperial, don't know it in metric. And I literally CANNOT picture what someone's height is in imperial, but I can if someoene gives it to me in cm.)
Remember the good old days when there were 12 pennies in a shilling, except in Jersey where there were 13 and the Isle of Man where there were 14, 20 shillings in a pound and 21 shillings in a guinea? The penny was divided into four farthings and the farthing was divided further into halves, or thirds in some colonies and quarters in others. Common coins were the farthing, the halfpenny, the penny, threepence, fourpence, sixpence, shilling, two shillings and two shillings and sixpence or half crown. I should have mentioned that five shillings were a crown, but crown coins were often only issued in coronation and jubilee years. We should go back to the old system after Brexit.
xD
Ah yes the old days where conversions were a nightmeare
As an American, I was a bit envious of the superior British monetary system, at least until they needlessly desecrated it on the altar of decimalization. Still, sad to see it go, always sad to see something quirky and human be destroyed in the name of homogeneity and soulless standardization.
I find it funny that so many people who make fun of the Americans for their out of place systems when most of the "Americanisms" were shared by the two until the 1970s and 80s. I guess it's because you don't really need to LEARN English living in the UK, it's the native language. Even silly things like calling football soccer (a distinction because we have our own football of course) when Soccer is still used in Canada and older football fans in Britain.
I'm certainly glad we never had to deal with currency conversion for everyday transactions, though. I remember seeing the Pilot episode for Doctor Who where they talk about how in the future, the pound is put in terms of Decimals, which in real life, would have only been in 15 years but was unthinkable in 1963.
The guinea is hilarious to me. A unit of currency worth 5% more than a pound.
Fehrenheit maps onto human comfort levels very well.
0: very cold
100: very hot
69: nice
Can’t argue too.
But water freezes at exactly 0 so it only makes sense that we start from the freezing temperature of the most neutral element and go lower or higher for freezing or heating up.
Water also boils at 100 degrees Celsius so it makes sense to use that ration.
@@The_Wan - that makes sense if you compulsively need your measurement system to line up with arbitrary conditions. But if you just want to cook food and know how hot it will be tomorrow, Fahrenheit works fine.
@@The_Wan Water is not an element. Also, why is fresh water more natural than salt water? Only distilled water freezes at exactly 0, and only at specific altitudes.
@@Mathhead2000
Well fuck, which one is closer to it? 32 degrees Fahrenheit or what?
@@Mathhead2000
Also, what do you mean what is not an element? Or you wanna go around shouting H2O? Search it up.
Anyways, I don’t have time man, go argue with some idiots like yourself
Great video. I'm a UK-based Engineer and would never dream of measuring or calculating anything in Imperial units. But as you point out - Imperial units are innately intuitive and that makes them particularly suitable for estimation purposes. My main objection is the US pint being smaller than the UK pint, which means that a visit to the pub when stateside can be somewhat disappointing :)
"Imperial units are innately intuitive"
How?
Why?
For whom?
@@dampaul13 inches and feet being based on human ish scale is kind of ice tbh (I AM A METRIC USER)
I'm a carpenter, not an engineer, so let's get that out of the way. I will say that although I'm an American, I have extensive experience with both the Imperial and Metric system of measurement. Not gonna lie, I like both. It's easier for me to guess and translate the length of something that's not, like hundreds of feet long (see what I did there?) in inches, rather than hundreds or thousands of millimeters. Most of my experience (which is A LOT) in mm's comes from using European machines, and I quite like them.
However, if you really want to piss people off let's talk about using the cubit on a jobsite. It is effective.
But it's just plain stupidity to use "thousands of millimeters" use centimeters or even better meters.
Right, but that argument doesnt make sense, as stated by the guy above, you never have to use hundreds of thousands of millimiters, or even thousands, OR EVEN HUNDREDs, there are new, completely equivalent, mesurements about every power of 10. You can just switch to centimeters, then meters, etc
@@geraldozampieri3867 thank you. The amount of stupidity in these comments from people using nonsense units is amusing
@@nom3nnescioYou sure got a lot of opinions for someone without a profile pic.
@@NitroNinja324 and you sure try to derail when you have nothing to say.
I find it helpful to consider the historical roots of different units. For example, the acre. An acre is an amount of land which one person with one ox can plough in one day. Not only that, but an acre was generally defined to have a particular shape, long and narrow, which is most practical to plough (because turning a plough around is inefficient).
even though it’s not particularly convenient from a standardization perspective, i find it very useful to have multiple systems of units to connote different uses. an acre is very useful for measuring agricultural land, because it was designed as a measure based on agriculture labor. Likewise a mile was designed to measure long distances travelled on foot, while a block has absolutely no standard definition but is universally useful for describing distances in urban environments. I love having multiple units of measurement.
To my knowledge, a block is about 1 cubic meter and works quite well when playing Minecraft.
Nope, 1 system is better.
@@rhozq Right, lets handicap ourselves and use only one method to describe things.
@@rhozq I'd much rather not use Celsius to measure outside temperature. Fahrenheit is better for that.
@@pepz8505 I don’t mind Celsius for outside temperature at all, but I also just don’t find it inconvenient to use different temperature scales since I never have practical cause to convert between them.
For any of you folks out there who've never used Imperial measurements and imagine they're like the worst thing ever, a good illustration for what Imperial measurement is like would be how pretty much everyone measures time.
Time is measured using a number of arbitrary units, and there are conversion factors including but not limited to 7, 24, 30, 52, 60, and 365.24. Now all of this isn't exactly ideal: If you ever need to convert 1.573 days to seconds, you're gonna want a calculator. However, that was an arbitrary, contrived math problem and you just don't need to do those unit conversions very often in everyday life. If you need to precisely convert units en masse, there are computer programs to do so, and in other cases mental math usually suffices.
Time is indeed measured with weird ass numbers, but if I could choose a system of measuring time that would use base 10, I would. Wouldn’t you? Fact is, time is a mess because we don’t get to choose when it’s day or night, but we do get to choose what a pound or killogramme is.
@@cluelessmango768 Day, month, and year are units that are helpful to have, yes. But if we wanted factors of 10, there's nothing stopping us from replacing hours, minutes, and seconds with centidays, millidays, microdays, etc.
And that was what I found on a Wikipedia page about “mixed radix”
@@iamthinking2252_ Umm what?
Yeah, I also wish time was in decimal. I hate those moments
I appreciate your comment on feet being a "comfortable" unit for working on human sized things. As a metric Australian (born in the 90s even), I do find inches far easier to visualise and think about than centimetres. Centimetres are too small for anything I'm directly going to use, and being a little bit off in my guess of a centimetre is proportionally quite significant. Estimating inches feels much more reasonable.
As someone brought up in an exclusively metric environment, I also have issues eyeballing stuff... Don't know if it's because of the metric system or because this skill isn't taught.
@@_blank-_skill issue, no joking tho.
My professor can say kinda accurated how many cm some stuff is just seeing it. He's mechanical engineer.
I'm trying to get that ability as well. 😅
There are a couple reasons why, and its because what they are based on. Each segment on your fingers is about an inch and your foot is about a foot, also because the inner side of your forearm is the length of your foot you could also say that the inner portion of your forearm is about a foot. You look at these things for 16 hour a day, every day, and see these things on other people at varying distances, which means it more intuitive at guestimating even when farther away. Not to say that a meter can't be taught to be recognized in real space, just that humans without outside intervention will relate to the things they can touch and feel.
Metric is better for exacts and abstracts. Abstracts in that you really don't visualize what a kilometer or mile is, you visualize how much time it takes based on how fast you are going to go what you are told is that distance. Its a scale that is too big for people to think about that way. And exacts as in... you know.. you need to follow something exactly.
Which is total self-deluding, strawgrasping bollocks. All that makes you look like is that you're afraid of numbers larger than one. Guess what, there is no inherent comfort in 1 inch over 3 cm just because one is 1 and one is not. Nobody said your feeling had to start with the first integer multiple of a unit. Comfortable is what you GOT comfortable WITH, including what number and unit you got comfortable expressing that with. This "comfort" argument is entirely and by necessity self-defeating.
You can just estimate in multiples of two. Like, I can estimate in centimeters up to like 26cm and then I switch to x2: 28, 30, 32, 34... In the same way I can only estimate millimeters up to 15, then I stop and go in multiples of 5
Telecom engineer here: I work for a Spanish company that once had a contract with Verizon to install some new antennas, they showed us the plan and the company started working on the data they had from Verizon. Me and my colleague (managing the config of the link) we looked at the plan and were baffled, they wrote numbers without metrics... Luckily Verizon wrote down the distance between Madrid and Toledo as '44', which is true in miles, but we both knew the 2 locations were about 70km away, on the radio configuration every millimeter counts so we halted the project ASAP to do recalculations, alot of money was lost..
Were the recalculations the reason as to why funds were wasted?
@@kazuyakenzaki1320 exactly, since they had to build new towers, they leased the property and the construction process was already ongoing
We had to relocate one of the towers and cancel the contract for one of the properties
Also, to non-Americans. Much in the same way that basically anyone who speaks a non-English language usually learns English, especially if they're young enough, most young Americans have at least a basic understanding of the metric system, for the same reason. If you say "5 kilometers" we're usually good enough to say "3 miles-ish".
I keep hearing/reading that, but considering number of Americans who ask "how much is that?" when metric units are used, I very much doubt it. You might be way too optimistic.
@@martinsriber7760 as an American who really was never taught anything about how the metric system works, I think they might be a little too optimistic
@@martinsriber7760 I have. It is taught as a standard.
yeah i cant convert celcius to fahrenheit but most rulers/yardsticks have the centimeters labled on the opposite side anyway so its not that hard to approximate it for length/distance
Unfortunately thats highly dependent on what education you got which is organized at the state level (In other words massively inconsistent). Especially if you're in a STEM heavy school or have a more modern curriculum you're likely to be working in metric a fair amount but the older the curriculum and the less focus on science in particular the less likely it is you've had much exposure to metric units. That's not even mentioning school to school variations which tend to be much more pronounced as you go up grade levels.
One thing I wish you had touched on was units of pressure, which are surprisingly bad in metric. A pascal is defined as a Newton per meter squared, which is a comically unwieldy unit to work with. A bar is defined as 10^5 pascals (breaking the otherwise consistent power-of-ten prefix system) and manages to be just slightly short of 1 atm. Atmospheric pressure is 1.0135 bar / 101350 Pa, which is sometimes enough to be a problem in calculations (but not always!). On the other hand, a psi (pound of force per square inch) is a much less unwieldy unit, and while atmospheric pressure is 15.7 psi I think it’s at least useful in that it’s never ambiguous whether or not you can be lazy and pretend 1 bar = 1 atm. Altogether I think this is a rare place where the metric system is at its limit and is arguable strictly less sensical than the imperial system
Edit: 14.7 not 15.7 psi
Also: people don’t use centibars, kilobars or megabars, they use kilopascals, megapascals, and gigapascals, which are tough because they’re defining things in terms of the awkward tiny unit instead of the not-quite-atmosphere-pressure unit and it’s impressively difficult to get a sense of how much pressure that actually is; I couldn’t give you any physical intuition as to what might exert a megapascal of pressure on an object. I’m a chemical engineering student so if there was anyone who should have that intuition it should be me. I can only (unhelpfully after a bit of mental math) say 1 megapascal is sort of like 10 atmospheres
That's why metric has sensible methods of scaling unit. The bar isn't exactly a hectopascal, but close enough. The bar is a non-metric measure, and the hectopascal and kilopascal (if you're Canadian) are the usual measure. The Pascal is closer in purpose to the psi.
Quick question: how many bar per psi?
Consistency and accuracy are more important than what you consider unwieldy.
@@talideon a hectopascal is .001 bar. If they are the same I am going to put you in a room at 1 bar then cut a small hole in it, exposing it to an environment at 1 hectopascal.
A bar is 14.5 psi.
@@martinsriber7760 I work with these units for a living, trust me when I say that it is preferable if your engineers have a physical intuition for what a unit is. Makes problem solving a Lot easier. Psi are stupid in other ways because of pounds force vs pounds mass but there is not a perfect unit for measuring pressure
2 things
Nautical mile was better defined as 1 second of latitude which is why it’s really beneficial to use in air and water applications
And the best way to remember the mile to foot ratio is ‘5 tomatoes’
5 to-mat-oes
5 2-8-0
the last thing literally doesn't help at all
Understand and remembering the tomatoes thing is harder than memorizing the number
technically that would be the same as 1 second of longitude too, right? Since the earth is a sphere.
@@Xnoob545 Gonna have to disagree. Pretty well established in psychology that a strange phrase or visualization, like someone juggling 5 tomatoes, is much more memorable mnemonic than an abstract number. It’s not hard at all to understand to me. Five two m-eight ohs.
@@ttt5020
1. The earth isn't a perfect sphere, or even a perfect spheroid its lumpy and that has funny consequences like the American GPS moving the prime meridian ≈100m from where the UK defined it.
2. The lines of longitude intersect at the poles so the distance between them varies with latitude, where as the lines of latitude are parallel so the distance between them are consistent. (So no it isn't possible to define 1 arc second of longitude as a nautical mile)
@@jasonreed7522 Ah right- 1 arc second of longitude only at the equator then!
Thanks for making this, I too, don't believe the imperial systems are better than metric, but they don't deserve the ridicule and have some minor advantages.
They are much more about people than the metric system.
Well yes, people made them before everything was about accuracy like in modern day's industrialized world.
1:53 You would be surprised to find out that the definition of a mile was, in fact, 5,000 feet up until the 1593 "Weights and Measures Act" when it changed to 5,280 feet so the eighth-of-a-mile stade could become identical to the furlong which was used in land grants. In "The Customs of London" by Richard Arnold (1502) there is a record of a 5,000 foot distance being called a "mile."
And then there's the Swedish mile, which is 10km.
@@qwertyTRiG That sounds like a joke. I hope it isn't.
@@qwertyTRiG I think if the US would switch to metric, having new imperial units redefined as being very close to metric, for example an inch being 30 centimeters and a mile being 6000 inches would be good for continuing this as a vernacular unit but with standardisation
@@gamermapper Aye, that's basically what Sweden did.
Yes, I was hoping someone would point this out. This is why the Roman mile is included, because it was the Imperial mile until the mile was lengthened for the furlong.
2:36 fun fact, actually!
We do sort of still use the unit "pica." I work in a historic print shop and it is very commonly used there, to the point of having special pica rulers. Many typographical things are measures in picas and points (as mentioned at 3:54). A pica is almost exactly 1/6 of an inch, and a point is 1/12 of a pica. For example, a 12-point font is exactly one pica tall. Therefore, if you are typing and the font size is divisible by 12, your text is that many picas tall. I believe that historically, picas are a bit off from 1/6 of an inch exactly, but the picas and points used in modern text editing programs do correspond to exactly six picas per inch.
Not even remotely related, but in Brasilian portuguese "pica" is a slang for penis
Reading this and keeping a straight face was painful
I only now pico, which is 1×10-¹²
@@apenasumcoalamagico8638 I laughed out lout when I read this again with this new context. I don’t think picas were historically anything near 1/6 of an inch, but I do think OP might have a micropica.
@@apenasumcoalamagico8638 hes talking about a really small pica. a piquinha
@@spcxplrr Yeah it would be either the 1978 standard of 1/72.27 or the 80s DTP (Desktop publishing pixel in this usage) that Warnock, Paxton et al established with Adobe Postscript which is 1/72th. Conversions between tradition printing and desktop publishing are a whole headache on their own because while there's representation of legacy typefaces on computers... ugh the early 90s were rough on printers that were trying to work around expectations and necessities that came from multiple formats (the pt traditionally hasn't been very consistent across typefaces, countries, manufacturers...).
It might also be worth pointing out that many countries (probably most countries) haven’t completely stopped using their old units. Countries like Australia and Canada still sometimes use imperial units. Japan has a set of units mainly related to housing area still in use. There is the Chinese pound. I’m sure there are more in other countries.
Honestly thats the dumbest bit about the whole measure stuff. Everyone should just agree on one standard, not mix up different systems.
That metric is better than imperial is just logical, considering imperial, like many other older systems (theres like a thousand definitions of a 'mile'), is a mess because it tried to bring many different types of measures together, and metric was later made as a logical standardization. Imperial isnt bad, just outdated, and keeping parts of it just causes problems.
Where in Australia is the Imperial system used?
The only time I ever see it is on really specific tools that have American origins. Things like router bits being defined as quarter or half inch shank (they also label the mm for those). But that is really really rare and really specific.
All roads, buildings, construction, schools, speed zones, everything is in metric
@@Nereosis16 Its usually some very niche applicatoins where imperial is still used. Its a bit overselling it to talk like those countries use both at the same time^^
And India uses lakh and crore constantly....
@@termitreter6545 "Countries like Australia...still sometimes use imperial units."
"Its usually some very niche applicatoins where imperial is still used."
Really?
Such as?
Individuals might.
Specifc industries might, like when keeping a constant to align with international standards, ie.aviation using feet.
But what are some examples of these "niche applicatoins" where the country of Australia use "imperial units?"
you forgot the football field (100 yards) which is used as a common intermediate step between feet/yards and miles
And isn't a soccer(football) pitch measured in yds?
"units having silly names is a good thing"
As a fan of the barn-megaparsec, I concur
the ending made me laugh, tho never actually encountered anybody who uses a hundredweight. stones tho, yeahhhh not sure why Imperial stuck around for peoples weights
Old English anvils are weighed in hundredweights, AKA 8 stone. And quarters, a quarter of a hundredweight, are just 2 stone. 1·1·1 would be 112 + 28 + 1 or 141 pounds.
Also, from the comments, English church bells.
@@Rack979 that really doesn't explain it though. Two extremely specialized craftsmen professions using a specialized unit of measurement doesn't explain why it continues to he in common use, especially not after Jan went over surveyor units and how 99.99% of Americans dont even know about them let alone use them.
@@DocWorm it's not in common use is the thing, saying that a hundredweight is used in britain is doing the same slight of hand as the chart does by presenting something used for specialisms as if that's the same thing as "common use". like if it was in common use this wouldn't be the first context i'd actually hear it defined and mentioned as if it's not some oddity
As a British person, I have absolutely no idea what a stone is
My actual foot is literally the same size as the unit of measurement known as a "foot" so it comes in handy because I can measure things with my body.
We need to get time on the metric system, and get rid of timezones
@@chillyavian7718 True but we could easily use one universal time. Only in China they would sleep from 18:00 to 02:00 and work from 2:00 to 10:00 while in the US they would sleep from 06:00 to 14:00 and work from 14:00 to 22:00.
@@richardbloemenkamp8532 UTC exists?
One fine point: the point you described is essentially not in use. Current use of the point is the Desktop Publishing Point, which IS exactly 1/72 of a Customary/International inch.
Interesting quirk. There are ALMOST exactly 1550 square inches in a square meter, it's actually suspiciously close to being an integer, to 3 decimal points.
Yeah, I just did the math: 1550.0031000062
@@danielbishop1863 Would what follows be ...00000093 or 0000000124?
@@andrewhawkins6754 Come to think of it, now that you point that out, I'm wondering if it's just a coincidence or if the pattern actually continues. 155, 310, 620, ...
@@andrewhawkins6754 Not a coincidence it seems. The value in every group of 6 digits really doubles throughout the decimal expansion (overlaps due to carrying obscure this relationship past 90 decimal places). So 000015.5, 000031, 000062, 000124, 000248, 000496, and so on.
1550.0031000062000124000248000496000992001984003968007936015872031744063488126976253952...
Why this happens definitely has to do with the factors of 2.54^2, but I'm not really sure which ones and how exactly. An infinite geometric series, maybe?
Math graduated student here.
It's most likely because a power of 10 is very near to a multiple of 254*254 = 64516 = (2*127)^2.
Powers of 10 from 100 onwards have gcd 4 with 64516 so that is the minimal distance between their multiples but that could be achieved only by multiples of powers of 10 with coefficient different from 1 (does it?).
Out of curiosity I just wrote a program to calculate Bézout coefficients using Euclidean algorithm and found out that indeed 64516*15500031 is 999999999996
I was quite surprised by how much those units influence our way of thinking. For example Americans using different systems for “length” and “distance” sounds so strange when it’s just a larger number for us.
I guess imperial trains us try and keep things in a range of 1/4 unit to 10 units although being in the hundreds is fine.
And since im an engineer I'm used to metric as well and often estimate stuff under an inch with cm or mm to try and stay within that 1/4 to 10 unit range.
Although the video makes the point that measuring human scale objects like furniture doesn't need to be easily convertable to the unit for long distances. A couch can be measured as 10ft long and a city is 10miles away, although we measure trips as both litteral distance in miles and travel time in hours or minutes as relevant.
I see it as metric as great for science with its easy conversions, and imperial is great for human scale without breaking out decimals or weird fractions.(although both have some hidden abominations like the metric ton being a megagram or the fact a pound mol exists for imperial the way mol exists for grams in SI/metric)
The switch from imperial to metric is pretty recent here in Canada (April 1, 1975). That's well within living memory. So in practice you still get a lot of mixing between the two, especially within older generations. Even I - a millennial who grew up learning the metric system in school - still uses imperial for certain things. My height? 5' 7" My weight? around 250lbs (yes, I'm fat, I know). Speed? kilometers per hour. Volume? litres. Everything depends on what I'm measuring. And I'm pretty sure we're not the only country that mixes measurement systems like this.
(Also, because I am a total weirdo, I actually measure the distance from one place to another in time. I do not care how many kilometers or miles away it is. That is genuinely never relevant to me. Tell me how long it will take me to get there!)
I think most people do, at least in my expierence
Greetings from Spain
I do this in the us
I'm Canadian, can confirm. Also my mom thinks in Fahrenheit because that conversion was relatively recent too.
I think it's pretty normal to measure distance by travel time.
Also, the temperature outside is measured in Celsius, but temperatures for cooking and baking are in Fahrenheit
Fun fact: in the UK at least, Google maps (and alternatives) say your turning is in some miles, and then it does, indeed, suddenly become yards. It is habitually a source of great distress for me on new journeys!!
Also, I sometimes, genuinely and non-ironically, use barleycorns and poppyseeds as units of measurement as they are for (UK) shoe sizes I believe: one size bigger is for feet one barleycorn longer :)
Google maps also gives driving directions not walking directions. With one-way streets it can be a long walk.
@@jasonwiley798 Google maps can be made to work for walking and I believe cycling(though I have never tried). Also pretty sure it can be set to work in K. meters, but again I don't use that.
@@stephenlee5929 Yes, there is a setting for nagivation on foot.
Interesting, US maps apps switch to feet under like 0.2 miles.
@@MTM358and I really wish it didn’t bc idk how far 100 feet is when I’m driving
in a practice round for debate I had to make the argument that the US Government shouldn't switch to metric and it went absolutely terribly (this was my second ever round so it makes sense) except for when my opponent asked, "how many ounces are in a pound?" to which I quickly and confidently replied, "16" and then my opponent asked, "how many pounds are in a ton?" to which I even more quickly replied, "2,000." After I said this my opponent got visibly red because the material he had prepared in response to my not knowing imperial units went to waste because I frequently spend hours learning the relationships between US customary units and have an incredibly good memory for random bullshit.
Your opponent could have easily shot back, "Wrong on both counts!" For you see, there are 12 ounces in a Troy pound and 2,240 pounds in a long ton. The former fact makes for a great riddle based on the fact that a pound of a precious metal (e.g. gold) weighs less than a pound of anything else, since the two categories are weighed using different types of pounds.
@@tomkerruish2982 He could have gone even further and pulled out some historical Imperial system because the English Imperial system used by Americans isnt the only one but they have roughly equivalent measurements, at least in terminology.
Example: The Austrian Imperial system of measurement.
anyways, GOOD VIDEO
Yeah it works if you know it lol
Lmao
tl;dr
"Almost all measurements for anything are handled with one, maaaaybe two units, and while we technically need to be able to convert one unit into another for regulatory and legal purposes in various contexts, in common usage this is never done. And even though metric makes it a million times easier to convert one unit into another, it's still of limited added utility because nobody needs to know how many centimeters apart two cities are, or how many kilometers taller their child grew this year."
It's so easy to do that it is actually funny. From the top of my head, I know people who live a trillion micrometers away, and someone who measures 0,003km taller than last year.
@@leoyoutube123 Easy but pointless isn't actually a good design goal.
@@leoyoutube123 Also, are you really claiming that you know someone who grew 3 meters in a year?
@@leoyoutube123 Wait. 0.003 km is 3 meters.
IS it that easy to do the equation?
@@Duiker36 It is not pointless.
This makes any more specific calculations way easier.
Not that useful for everyday life, but for scientists and specialist - absolutely amazing.
My grandfather and his brother used to measure things in “acrewalls” (660 feet) and “acrends” (60 feet I think) they also measured rain in points and distance in Irish Miles just to make it extra confusing, but they would never tell you which miles they were using so you just crossed your fingers and threw the map out the window.
It would have been 66 by 660 feet. It derives from the US Public Land Survey System, in which acres could be surveyed as 4x40 rods. Forty rods is a furlong, so that is the length you would plow before resting your ox.
Finally, some awesome and entertaining metrology content!!! I’m so glad you talked about SI units!
“Something doesn’t add up here, or in this case, multiply.”
Well played.
Edit: by the way, the editing on this is great! Nice job!
I mean multiplication is just doing a bunch of addition at the same time
ESK 56 my math teacher as a sophomore in high school said that division is just multiplying by fractions and subtraction is just adding negative numbers so they don’t exist. hard to argue with that really
@@bananacat3109 And roots don't exist as it's just exponentiation to the power of a fraction!
Also, nautical miles were barely mentioned but nautical miles (1852 meters) and derived units like knots have conversions to meters and miles but are defined as the arc length of one minute of latitude (1/60th of a degree) which is very useful for naval navigation, really makes sense on a global scale and would never be used or expected to be known by an average impearial user. Miles which are Roman paces (and does have a Latin prefix i just realized) are a totally different but similar distance unit
What's funny is that the nautical mile, being the arc length of one minute of latitude, is essentially defined in the same fashion as the original definition of the meter, being 1/10,000,000th of the distance from either pole to the equator. One minute of latitude means that the nautical mile is 1/3600th the distance from the equator to a pole. Exact same idea.
And despite metric seeking to rationalize everything into tens/powers of ten, degrees, minutes, and seconds are still around, because 60 is a fantastic number, being evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30.
This is an amazing video, thank you for posting these for free!!
Should you decide to revisit this topic, you might also consider the fact that most units within the 'Imperial System' exist explicitly because they are human in scale:
~ Feet and Inches, originally based on the human body (length of one's foot and width of one's thumb), are perfectly logical for measuring objects human beings interact with. Hand is still used with livestock (horses in particular), being a similarly convenient way to quickly measure how big an animal is.
~ Mile (based upon one thousand paces) is also the approximate distance a person is able to see while on land (as terrain is rarely flat enough to see beyond this distance).
~ League is similarly based upon the approximate distance a person is able to see while at sea - approximately three miles, owing to the curvature of the earth. This varied some (from 2.4 for someone in a rowboat to 4.6 miles for someone in a crow's nest) but was later standardized to three miles.
~ Fathom is an Old English term referring to the distance between a man's outstretched arms. It was primarily nautical, providing a ready means for sailors to lower a weighted rope over the side to determine how deep the water was. Cable (or Cable-Length) was literally the standardized length of cable connected to a ship's anchor. (100 fathoms for US ships; 120 fathoms for British ships.)
~ Chain and Furlong are both derived from an Acre (1/640 of a square mile), which is the amount of land a single farmer could reasonably work in a single day. While 43,560 square feet seems arbitrary, it is rather conveniently the product of one Chain (66 feet) by ten Chain (660 feet) - the latter also dubbed a Furlong because it was more convenient to plow a *furrow* in the *long* direction.
~ Rod and Link, in turn, are derived from the standardized Chain used by surveyors. A full Chain (used for longer distances) was comprised of 100 interconnected segments (each Link being ~8" in length) so it could be stored in a canvas bag for transport; a Rod (used for shorter distances) was comprised of 25 Links, being lighter and easier to transport. (See sahistoryhub.history.sa.gov.au/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_full_crop/public/media/2003-95_survey_chain.jpg)
~ Point is used exclusively in printing (as you said) and originated as the smallest discrete unit one could consistently gauge with an unaided eye.
As you can see, despite their varied origins, all these units are very intuitive in regards to being human-scale. Even when inexact (before they became better standardized), they readily conveyed a sense of the scale you were dealing with. A Mile was a short walk or easy run; a Fathom was roughly a man's height; Feet denoted something vaguely human-sized while Inches indicated something which could readily be carried; a League was how far one could see if there were no obstructions (such as when at sea).
Bonus:
~ Mil came about in the Industrial Era to measure thin materials - abbreviated from the original term "mili-inch" (thousandth of an inch, just like the Metric System).
~ The ropes sailors used to measure the depth of water were seldom more than 100 feet in length. The phrase "too deep to fathom" was literal, in that they didn't have the means to actually determine how deep the water was beyond the length of their ropes.
It isn’t just convenience that makes the “hand” (4 inches) useful for measuring the height of a horse. The foot is too coarse a unit and the inch is too fine. The hand is convenient, though, even though you probably don’t have a measuring stick marked in hands. If you calibrate the height of your shoulder in hands, then you can easily estimate the height of a horse when standing next to it.
@@GH-oi2jf Yes, granularity! That was the term I was trying to pinpoint. The units used in the 'Imperial System' are aptly suited for the dimensions to which they are applied.
as an American who uses imperial every day, I have literally never heard of the majority of the measurements on that chart lmao
same al ive heard were centimeters, milimeters. feet, yards and miles lol
As an Australian, we have used metric since my mother was in school. I'm acquainted with most of them to some degree though, hell even here despite being metric the registries usually require we still use hands to measure our horses.
Pounds and stones (14 pounds) were still semi common when I was a kid in the 80s to measure a person's weight. Mostly that's died thankfully.
Nautical miles, and knots, are stil referenced especially in maritime service and flight as well.
Pica and Point are used pretty much globally in printing still.
Acres are still used for area when we're talking land.
Grain is still a unit of weight used for propellant in firearms, also the weight of arrows and crossbow bolts.
So yes while they're antiquated and annoying AF when you're constantly having to do conversions, aka me, a lot of them still get used in edge cases I just went for ones I know are still commonly employed in at least a limited sphere.
That's not surprising. This is a complete system, it's just that most of the units don't serve a particular point these days that can't be served with one of the others. For the most part, the gaps are either only apparent for things like physics/engineering like slugs or fall in the hole between yards and miles. Chances are that you're not talking about things of that length often enough to care about having to use slightly larger numbers of either feet or yards. Chances are in that range quarters of a mile are good enough for the precision of what you're doing.
I've gotten pretty used to using metric since my firm has been metric-only since the 80's. But I grew up learning imperial first, so I constantly have to translate... Which is annoying. It's especially annoying when people use weight and mass units improperly.... I'm looking at you pound-mass and Kilogram-force.
Same
You are very correct in that ~30 cm is a very useful human scale measurement. Growing up in Sweden, the rulers we were assigned in primary school were 30 centimeters long. I still, 30 years later, sometimes think of lengths in "number of rulers".
Let's say I had a 50cm long ruler at home...
The standard ISO A4 paper size (296 mm) is also close to a foot.
The convenience doesn’t come from its scale but only from the fact that we had foot-long rulers and the supply chain that made them readily available. Same with the “19 l” jugs used with water coolers - they are actually 5 US gallon jugs. We could have 20 l jugs to round things up, but we just couldn’t be arsed 😂
Modifying established supply chains is hard.
@@danielbishop1863 and the other side is 210 and its actually 297.301 rounded to nearest mm. this is the formula 2^(1/4−n/2) where n is your paper size, for the short side 2^(-1/4−n/2)
When the 'cubic inches' example came up I thought that was something I'd never encountered then realised I had. Because car manufacturers in the USA give engine sizes in cubic inches and everyone else uses litres, I had at the back of my mind that 100 cubic inches = about 1.6 litres. (it's actually 1638).
Looks like I'm 9 months late to the party, but since people are still commenting, here's a few thoughts (which were likely covered in the previous 7.52 kilocomments by the current counter):
1 - Although the video treats the nautical mile (nmi) as some strange appendage to the USCS, it's actually insanely useful to anyone who navigates by air or sea. 1 nmi = 1 minute of latitude. So your chart always has a baked in scale if you have lat / lon markings on it. Same applies to knots (nmi / hr).
2 - lots of people cite fractions as something implicitly wrong with the imperial system. But there is such a thing as decimal inches. You can even buy a decimal inch tape measure without looking around too hard. Also, humans are eerily good at eyeballing the midpoint of a line. If you know what an inch is, you can get to a 16th with surprisingly good precision.
3 - Using N-m as a unit of torque sucks if you're wrenching on stuff instead of designing it. I know what 15 lbs feels like and most wrenches are about a foot long. So it's easy to guesstimate 15 ft-lbs is. And I know what a kg weighs, roughly, so that wouldn't be bad, but who the hell knows what a Newton feels like?
4 - If you think that all metric units are convertible by powers of 10, I'd like you to take a look at your watch....
What you mean is that we need a new system with the nautical mile as its base...in base 12. 🤔
Also revolutionary France tried to make a 10-hour day and a 10-day week, but they realized that the peasants would slaughter them all very soon if they kept that up!
The second is not a metric unit, it is an SI unit, but that does not make it metric. If it were metric, it would be decimal time.
Also for point 3, pounds per square inch is much more intuitive for pressure than atmospheres.
I agree with 1 but:
2) Decimal inches exist yes but feet is still 12 in not 10, Its not uniform
Metric is.
3) It comes to what you are used to, If you always used to N-m then it wouldn't be too hard and infact the opposite will be true, So if both can be used without problem, Use the better one.
4) Time & angles are not metric! For time the second is an actual SI unit but hours, minutes etc. aren't. There does exist metric time where: 100s = 1min, 100min = 1h, 10h = 1d, 5d = 1w, 25d/5w = 1mon, 10mon = 1y (definitions vary) but all this hasn't been implemented.
Interms of angles its a fight between Radians (more mathematically useful since units of π are used) and Gradians (more metric since right angle=100°)
Radians are very commonly used but for common use they are kinda terrible but gradians haven't been much widespread
If a big push is made then metric time and gradians could succeed but it'll be too much effort.
I advocate using the plank mass wherever possible. It's about 20 micrograms, so it's useful in dosing certain drugs.
That's a very tiny plank.
isn't there a common joke that some Americans know metric quite well? to fend off your 1/8th of a gram from the rival gang, you'd use your 9mm
dang, I'll keep that in mind
issue I think is that it hasn't been measured as precisely as some other units, due to the difficulty in measuring G as precisely as one might want?
@@drdca8263 Eh, we got G to 6 sig fig.
You're actually wrong about barleycorn not being used. Kind of. While it's technically not really used directly by most people, it's actually the basis for American shoe sizes.
measuring soles with barleycorns sounds very painful
Ohhh, NOW it makes sense
But as was said by a poster above, industries tend to make up their own units of measurement anyway. Like, "point" is an industry-specific term, made up because they needed something with that precise degree of fineness, and that scale, using whole integers (or close to) rather than decimals or fractions. Even if shoe sizes are technically in barelycorns, it's less that it's equal to barleycorn and more that it is "the shoe size unit"
Yay! I personally love the barleycorn. I'm glad to hear it's still used somewhere
So they aren't actually using the barleycorn then. I'm a size 13, and my foot is definitely not 4 and 1/3 inches long.
@@tissuepaper9962 It's more like barleycorn with the 0 placed at some size considered the minimum practical. Which is why it's different for men's, women's, and children's shoes
This may be my favorite video of yours this is my fourth rewatch it’s that good.
Fifth
In Canada we still use both for a LOT.
I like imperial for small measurements, inches and feet. And for measuring weight pounds feels more precise than kilograms. Kilometers are used more common than miles though
I like that the units in imperial have many factors. 12 inches in a foot, so a foot has 3 factors. I took woodshop in high school, and preferred using the imperial system in there because it was easier to measure halves, quarters, eighths, and so on. The metric system is easier IMO for math/science calculations.
The true issue is that we do not use a base 12 number system. Base 10 is frankly weird and not ideal for dividing in metric. Imperial kinda accounts for this in a decent number of practical applications, but if we were base 12 the metric system would not have the issue to begin with.
That's basically what most Americans do anyway; Imperial to eyeball it, metric for precision. It's easier to visualize a foot (your foot) or an inch (first thumb segment) than it is to visualize a meter. "six feet tall" sounds more impressive than "1.8 meters tall".
@@MachineMan-mj4gj that's only because you grew up with imperial, not an inherent quality of the units. I can't visualise feet well in the slightest for example and always have to roughly convert to metres for it to make much sense to me at all
@@lizardlegend42 Well that sounds like a you problem.
@@MachineMan-mj4gj yeah... it is, that's my point. Because I only really grew up with metric, metric is what's intuitive to me. Neither system is ingerently more intuitive than the other
One interesting thing about 5280, the number of feet in a mile. It is divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,8 and 10. That may have something to do with why it's used.
This is a great point I hadn't thought about.
Yep, and it makes sense actually, I really only have American perspective on this... but we seem to use ½ miles and ¼ miles and so on more often, while other countries would say 0.5 km and 0.25 km because their system is made for decimal. Same with cups and pounds, vs liters and grams. We like using fractions
@@caritahearts2405 just for context, we don't use "0.5km" or 0.25km" we use 500 meters and 250 meters, when we have to work with decimals we automatically convert the unit, because it is very easy to do
@@caritahearts2405 The metric system is not made for decimals. Who in the right mind would say 0.5 Km or point 0.25Km? It would be better if you said that it was made for whole numbers. we can convert everything into an actual real value because its an ACTUAL system. Hek, we say half a kilometer or a quarter kilometer more than actually ever using decimals. Ironically, Imperials use decimal a hek of a lot more often than Metric because it cant do anything that doesn't have an exact value and thats what most people hate about it.
Great point lol. I convert my videos to include metric stuff because international units are pretty useful to have in your pocket. I'ma take the time to learn the metric system so I don't have to say "I'm 5'6" when discussing my height.
I posit that in the modern era, anthropometric measurement is still super useful. In elementary school I was taught that an inch was about the length of my thumb, which was accurate at the time, and i eventually extrapolated from this idea and measured the span of my hand, distance from thumb to forefinger, and more, so that i can approximate measurements without a ruler. I also pay attention to what certain portion sizes look like in my hand, and i use this every day at work where i make salads and sandwiches (corporate would probably prefer i used the scale and scoops lol). Honestly, i often have a tape measure with me but still find myself measuring with my hands.
Imperial is super good for quick but imprecise measurements, not a bad thing, it’s useful when you only need a practical approximates.
Metric is good for precision and in theoretical approximates
You earned my subscription .Excellent. Slightly jaded view on how we use all systems here in Blighty.
Even though I’m American, I surprisingly was taught about centimeters back in kindergarten class. But that is all they taught us, I used centimeters so much I always thought they were a weird division of inches, I was shocked to learn centimeters are an entire different system.
Edit: Yeah so apparently what I find surprising is surprising in of itself.
America technically is on metric, because we define our imperial units by metric units, so it's not that odd imo.
What’s surprising is you think this is surprising. Most Americans are taught the entirety of the metric system alongside the US Customary. It’s weird that you were taught so little
When I was in elementary school, I think it was still thought that America would eventually go metric, so we only used metric units in Math.
Oddly enough, I've gone into a career in science, and we do use metric exclusively. (Yes I, and American, use the metric system. GASP!)
@@ClementinesmWTF That’s weird, I had to research the rest of the metric system on my own time.
@@jstnrgrs changing all the signs is a waste of money, and everything else that's objective has been changed.
“The Chart” states hands are not in general use, but they are a common way to give the height of a horse.
People also use them to hold things, I think
If you think horse-measuring is "general use", I'd like to introduce you to the concept of an "outlier"
@@yozul1, honestly, I was under the impression the unit was used to give a sense of scale in horse races.
it's weird that the hand has an asterisk, but the point doesn't, but I guess a lot more people type on computers than they do ride horses
that asterisk is there because it's also there in the NIST handbook
Your channel is like if vsauce kept on topic for more than 5 seconds and I love it
In Sweden we have a measurement called a “mile” but it’s metric, meaning 10 kilometres
To be fair, metric becomes leaps and bounds more useful than imperial in the context of science. Defining a kilogram as the mass of a litre of water is actually extremely useful in most science fields, as water is by far the most common solvent in chemistry and also a good analog for flesh in biology.
It's pretty helpful for some everyday activities too, when baking most things have a density close to water.
It also makes finguring out some standard values and unit conversion factors possible when a look up table isn't exactly available (exams)
With the exception of celcius, though, which is just a worse version of Kelvin in scientific contexts
@@linoshcaalomar3951 it's not that bad, you just add 270-280 something to Celsius to find Kelvin and for everyday usage, Celsius is more useful imo
Bro nobody is saying that metric isn't better than imperial. Lmao these people
Also, most of the Anglosphere really has no justification for throwing shade at the US for not converting to metric, because here in Canada and most of the rest of the Commonwealth, we still use Imperial for the kinds of easy, human-sized measurements that that system is good for; we've held onto these units in common practice because they are legit useful, and we can take no legitimate pride in converting fully to any one system. At this point, the focus should be on redefining the Imperial units such that their metric conversion factors are less awful. The inch should be 2.5 cm, the mile should be 1600 meters exactly, the pound should be 450 grams, the gallon should be 4 liters, etc etc.
China actually went even farther, often quite drastically redefining traditional units to fit convenient metric conversion factors when they last standardized in 1930. Their foot-equivalent is exactly 1/3 of a meter, their mile is exactly half a kilometer, their pound is exactly half a kilogram, and so forth. That 1/3 of a meter system btw is genius, since it fixes one of the most glaring problems with metric, the inability to third things, by simply bolting on units for 1/3 of most metric lengths and calling it a day; as long as the two systems coexist and have such sane conversion factors it works marvelously well. Similarly, their pound is divided into 16 ounces before moving to powers of 10 in its further subdivisions, just so as to allow for the intuitiveness of powers of 2 to be felt on that particularly human scale, and if anything I think it's a shame that that wasn't also used for volume where it would probably be even more convenient... though my experience with Imperial powers of 2-based volumes in cooking certainly colours that impression.
Point is, having a human scale to systems of measurement is extremely valuable, and it's something the metric system systematically lacks, and it's something that can be added with simple and sane conversion factors with minimal fuss.
This is actually genius. And heck, all you really gotta do is redefine the yard as a meter, which is basically close enough, thus the foot as 1/3 meter, inches 1/12 of that, so on. It would probably still be utter hell to convert between mathwise, but it would indeed solve the biggest issue of metric, which is the absolute nightmare that thirds are.
Probably the first comment I agree with. Objectively thirds are a disadvantage of the metric system. We mostly aproximate and round when we have to deal with thirds (like in construction or woodworking) or scale up (in cooking for example).
But metric not being on a human scale? I disagree with that. 0 degrees is freezing, 20 is roomtemperature, 100 is boiling. A centimeter is a fingernail, a decimeter is a hand length, a meter is a stride. A kilo is a bottle of water as is a liter. A quater liter (or Viertele in German) is one cup of wine. 2 centiliters are a shot, so a centiliter is a small shot. A quater kilo or 250 grams is a stick of butter, 100 grams is a bar of chocolate.
And so on
Obviously alot of these associations have been established after the fact (the butter for example). It still shows that it is perfectly pheasible to use metric on a human scale, as a huge part of the world does it.
@@carlosdumbratzen6332 But does anyone use decimeters? In my experience, people tend to go directly from centimeters to meters, meaning there's no unit at a convenient size for, broadly, anything from "a handful" to "a person's height". Which is most of what a person interacts with day-to-day. Temperature - sure, freezing and boiling are more-or-less at convenient numbers (depending on air pressure), but weather and habitation is crunched down into a much smaller piece of the scale as a result (thermostats tend to go for integer degrees Fahrenheit, but tenths of a degree Celsius, because a degree Celsius is too big) and I'd say "do I need a coat today" is more common than "how close is this to boiling" - if you're boiling a pot of water, you don't do that by thermometer, you do it by eye, right? Specific temperatures outside the "weather" range are relevant for meat and baked goods, but those temperatures aren't particularly related to the boiling point of water anyway.
Volume and mass, I won't argue, because the only time I would actually have practical uses for those units is for recipes, and at that point the convenient size is "whatever your recipe and/or measuring tools are marked in". Whether milk comes in gallon, half-gallon (two-quart), quart, and pint sizes, or four-liter, two-liter, liter, and half-liter sizes is basically immaterial; it's all approximately equally convenient numbers and sizes and at no point do metric prefixes get involved in the latter case. Similarly for pounds and kilos, though I will admit to being surprised to hear that your butter comes in quarter-kilo sticks; ours comes in quarter-pound sticks (less than half the size), generally in four-stick packages, with the wax-paper wrapping marked at tablespoons for volume measurement for baking (eighths of a stick, so half an ounce, or close enough for the precision you'll be able to manage cutting butter by hand). A quarter-kilo stick of butter sounds like a pretty big stick!
@@qwertystop People usually say height in centimeters rounded to the closest so it's still basically decimeters
If you simultaneously define an inch as 2.5 cm and a mile as 1600 m, then you get an awkward 5333.333... feet in a mile. Though I suppose that's not really much weirder than 5280.
I know America’s way of measurement isn’t great, but it still causes part of my mind to say “How dare you say it’s bad!” It’s very deeply rooted in my mind, and I think that that’s true for other people as well. I might be wrong about that tho lol.
It's still pretty bad though.
I see it as 1 system is great for science as the prefixes take you from subatomic to galactic distances without needing new words (also technically imperial uses them, most notably mils are mili-inches and for time) but imperial being a hodge podge of legacy units of convenience means its much better for daily human scale uses. (°F is more granular than °C but when i get significantly over 100°F or below -40°F i switch to °C)
@@jasonreed7522 I often see similar comments about human scale and I would disagree. I think both are fine for human scale and it's mainly about what we have an internalized feeling for. I couldn't tell the difference of ±1°C and have never felt the need for higher granularity. Maybe if I'd grown up with Fahrenheit I'd be more sensitive to it, just like I feel an inch is too large to be useful.
@@_Kiren_ I do actually think feet are amazing for human scale, though. At about a third of a meter, you can describe TONS of household lengths as 1 ft, 1/2 ft, 1/4 ft, 2 ft, 5-6 ft, etc. It's just a very pleasant and convenient size to work with.
Inches are also super convenient, not because the size itself is great, but because it divides so nicely into feet. 12 is a *beautiful* number to work with; it makes working with fractions remarkably easy.
Tbh, if you call a metric foot 30 cm, and a metric inch 2.5 cm, then you've (almost) got me entirely hooked on metric. Those two units are so easy to use.
I would be willing to lose Farenheit, but I do quite like it. It's very intuitive: 0 is about the coldest you expect to see in a year (except for very cold climates), and 100 is about the hottest (again, except for very hot climates). Room temperature is about 70 degrees, and from there you can think in intervals of 10. 80 is warm, 90 is hot, 100 is extremely hot. 60 is brisk, 50 is cool, 40 is cold, 30 is very cold. (You can tell I'm from the southern US because I know the top end of the scale way better than the bottom.)
Celsius seems fine, but imo operating on a scale from roughly -20 to 40 seems like a way clumsier system than roughly 0 to 100. The "granularity" isn't the draw for Farenheit, it's how nicely it rounds and how well it maps to human perception.
@@natekite7532 I agree that base 12 is superior for subdivisions, it'd be great if we could switch all counting to be base 12. If a mile was subdivided into feet I'd be more amicable to imperial units.
Apart from that, I don't think there's an inherent value to any measuring system for regular people. We mostly find post-hoc justifications for why the system we're brought up on seems intuitive, I think. People using metric are gonna have a good hunch about how many cm different household objects are and have similar ranges for temperature where 20 is about room temp, 30 is hot, 10 is cool, etc.
I'm just not sure if that is a good argument for either system, more so a defense that it's hard to convince people to switch.
As a US engineering student, I hate imperial when doing dynamic analysis. Slugs are such a weirdly important unit of calculation that we literally never hear of outside of engineering. The tendency to just input lbs when dealing with mass is so hard to break since thats the units my brain associates with weight (yes, I know that's a force. Colloquially weight is often equated with mass so I'm culturally conditioned)
You could start with Feet and Inches and build an entire system based in Multiples of 12.
You could start with Feet and Palms and build an entire system based in Powers of 2.
Whichever you prefer, some unit just got redefined
and now there's a a four-digit decimal conversion.
or u could just use metric
You could start with metric units and define dozenal prefixes (e.g. you could make it so 1 kidometer = 1728 meters, similar to 1 kibimeter = 1024 meters). Done. Without having to make up a bunch of new units.
@@LaggyKar You'd want to define new units. One of the few things I like about metric is how carefully they chose the units (which is important when unit size is mostly out of your control). Yes the greatmetre (a great gross of metres) is close to a mile, which is great, but you'd want to calibrate it to make sure the other units end up being useful too.
Also I propose 12^-3 is small- then petti- and unci-. Above the basic unit: doza-, grossa-, great-, monstro-, giganto-, titano-. No thoughts on powers below small-
@@linkhidalgogato you might’ve missed the meta-point of his comment: metric was arbitrarily made up in the beginning just like he described already defined units.
@@ClementinesmWTF Yeah. Every one of these units that confuse us now made perfect sense to the person who thought of it. They lived a long time ago, a long ways away, and spoke a totally different language.
The Roman Mile was Mille Passus, literally just the phrase 'Thousand Paces' in Latin. It got shortened to Mille and then to Mile, and since we don't speak Latin the originally clear and comprehensible meaning is lost on us.
1000 Paces became 5000 Feet, which then became 5280 because some ruler, a thousand years later, half a continent away, came up with a scheme to raise taxes by changing the length of a foot.
People don't just make bad systems, they make systems that work for them, and problems creep in over time.
What I find interesting is the difference between Imperial and US Customary Gallons. The US system uses the Old English Wine Gallon, which is 231 cubic inches. It was standardized in 1706, and was the volume of a cylinder 7 inches in diameter and 6 inches in height. The Imperial Gallon, on the other hand, was defined in 1824, and was the volume of 10 pounds of distilled water at a temperature of 62º F and at an atmospheric pressure of 30 inches of Mercury. Two totally different methods of defining the Gallon.
Both systems of volume (at least down to Ounces) was set based on this definition, with both systems having four Quarts to a Gallon, two Pints to a Quart, two Cups to a Pint, and two Gill to a Cup. To compensate for the difference in gallon sizes, the Imperial system then claimed there were FIVE Ounces to a Gill, while Imperial had FOUR Ounces to a Gill. This means an Imperial Pint is 20 Ounces while a US Customary Pint is 16 Ounces. Oh, and the Ounces are slightly different between the two (28.413 ml for Imperial, 29.5735 ml for US Customary).
On top of all that, the US system ALSO has the US Food Labeling Fluid Ounce, which is exactly 30 ml, just to tie in with the Metric side of things again.
On top of all of that, alcohol is measured/sold in the US in millilitres/litres but served based (sort of) on ounces, it's utterly chaotic
The fact that imperial and US customary disagree with each other on units of volume drives me absolutely nuts. And hardly anyone talks about it, or even knows about it! One of the best reasons to go metric that I can think of.
That definition from 1706 means that the cubic inch and the wine gallon are definitionally an irrational factor from each other, which is quite funny to me.
I remember wondering why a pint of beer was going to be so expensive, then they brought it out, and I was like, WTF? That’s more than half a liter! This lead me to reading up about the differences while drinking at a pub. Meanwhile, our Maß was close enough to a liter that we now just declare it to be a liter, and it’s a convenient measure of beer here in Bavaria.
"16.67floz"
this gives the same energy as that pros and cons of slavery presentation
The Metric monotheists are the slaveholders, though. They don’t want English units to have equal status.
Actually, converting between km and m is pretty common. For example, a toll road marker usually gives a distance between current location and the start of the toll road in km and m subdivision. Like: 72km 600m
That's just 72.6 km.
So basically, this video is saying "the imperial system isn't idiotic on purpose, it's an idiotic Frankenstein of stitched-together systems".
Good to know
@@Washington715 summaries do not have to use all the same words
I've lived under both systems and metric just sucks. It doesn't do anything that people would normally do better, and a lot of it is just plain annoying. The fact that there are so many videos that have been made trying to convince Americans that we're wrong is pretty good evidence of how bad the system is. If the system were that good, it wouldn't take bombing the crap out of a country and its inability to manufacture it's own products to convince them to switch. And yes, I mean that, few, if any, countries switched that had the ability to produce their own stuff or had a functioning and enforced system of measure.
The US keeps using our system for most stuff because, it works well and we've been enforcing it for quite a while. We even have the Bureau of Weights and Measures to make sure that the scales and what have you are accurate. Which was not the case in most other countries that made the switch. SI was just in the right place at the right time when a powerful set of countries with poorly enforced standards could force it on the rest of us.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade lmao
@@Washington715 Maybe not, but both the person in the video and the person you're responding to have no interest in giving the imperial measurement system any validity to exist and are simply interested in mocking it with their ignorance. That says more about them than it ever will about the Imperial system of weights and measures.
@@daexion wait? the video was making fun of the Imperial system? I thought he was being pretty generous with it.
Now that you explained that miles and feet come from two different systems of measurement, everything makes more sense. Obviously when converting between systems there are going to be wacky numbers.
all the stuff about nails, palms, digits and such is something i'm somewhat familiar with but only as a person with a hobby for dress history, where old sewing guides are written using those units. it's really something no one uses outside of discussing certain aspects of history