Feet, inches, yards, pounds

>feet, inches, yards, pounds

Long live the metric system.
I pity you inferior americans.

I always fuck up with zeroes when using lots of metric units. Doesn't seem to happen with US.

>I always fuck up with zeroes
brainlet, its not that fucking hard

Brit-boys, what’s so confusing about the US customary system

It's much easier to give eyeball estimates in US standard units than metric ones, because they're based on the natural sizes people spontaneously start using if they have to invent them piecemeal for different tasks, and then standardized into fixed multiples of each other.

The metric system is an inferior imitation of the English standard of weights and measures which pre-existed it. The purpose in inventing a new system, rather than adopting the English one, was not to make a better system, but to create incompatibility, to try to hobble the advanced English industry from competing in continental markets.

It's no coincidence that the only people who have walked on the moon did so while calculating in feet and pounds. They maintained continuity with the most advanced industry rather than ever stopping to retool everything, and used the units most convenient for humans doing actual hands-on work, rather than the dumbed-down oversimplifications beloved of central planners and ivory tower academics who want to jump from context to context and pretend they have a useful understanding of technical figures without even doing some basic arithmetic.

what the fuck are you talking about, it's just a measurement unit, not a fucking philosophy

>1000 ms a second, 60 seconds a minute, 60 seconds an hour, 24 hours a day, 365,593833 days a year

Choice of units carries implications about motive and mindset, affects efficiency of hands-on work and calculation in different ways, and change of units has serious consequences for industry.

Metric is beloved of dabblers and meddlers, because it lets you jump from context to context and pretend to understand figures without investing any effort.

A metric-using country that never had precise, standardized units before metric was an industrially backwards one, which likely had cultural defects causing it to fall behind, and is still probably playing follower rather than leader. A metric-using country that had precise, standardized units and had its people forced to use metric is one that has been dominated by authoritarians and bureaucrats who throw wrenches in gears they don't comprehend. It's likely under would-be communist leadership and at least leaning toward collective suicide through idiocy by now.

>2017
>Still using the metric system
Hoo boy

Take your meds

-t. Parroting puppet

You do realise that the US use the metric system and that feet, pound and so on are all defined in the metric system right? The reason for the introduction of the metric system was to make it harder for the nobels to cheat the peasants on taxes by using a non standardized system.

The funny thing is, is that pounds are not even a standard unit on the U.S. Customary System. The actual standard of mass on the U.S. system is the slug.

>It's much easier to give eyeball estimates in US standard units than metric ones
It isn't. It's easier to you because that's the units you're familiar and accustomed to

>US customary system
You mean the British Imperial System?

The metric system is why I switched to pure math. That shit makes no sense

>You do realise that the US use the metric system
It is unavoidable for international trade. Its industry still runs primarily on US standard units.

>and that feet, pound and so on are all defined in the metric system right?
They were defined before that. For whatever reason, scientific effort has focused on refining the metric system. It would be hopelessly pigheaded to not use the world's best scientific measurements, or needlessly reduplicate the effort, in updating the standard.

>The reason for the introduction of the metric system was to make it harder for the nobels to cheat the peasants on taxes by using a non standardized system.
As I already said, you have to take into account the fact that the English system was already standardized, and the metric system was developed by England's rivals, who based it on the reasoning behind the English system, but created an incompatible system instead of adopting the ready-to-use English one largely out of spite and chauvinism.

I was raised on the metric system, and have learned the US standard system, and it's much better for eyeball estimates, particularly the custom of using fractions rather than decimals (or effectively using decimals by jumping to a different unit). Eyeball estimates work best by knowing a few units and giving a small-number multiple or division of those. It's easy to divide something into three or four parts at a glance, but ten is too many, and while the factor of ten is easy to do arithmetic with in a base-10 number system, it complicates the expression of quarters and especially thirds.

The pound mass and pound force are US customary unit, along with the pound force. The slug is a mass unit derived from the pound force in a different manner which is convenient for some physical calculations.

The slug is from the FPS system, invented for convenience of physics work around the turn of the 20th century. The pound is much older.

That's because babylonians didn't use base 10.

These were invented in europe and were meant to be units any person could easily measure without any instruments. Most of the time they're based on using something most people had access to.

>They were defined before that.
Indeed. They had a well-defined meaning in every town and village. A *different* meaning in every town and village, that is.

You know how British-traditional versions of imperial units are slightly different from American-traditional ones, and there are seventeen different versions of the mile? Before the metric system, every hour of travel got you to a place with different versions of units. And this was no coincidence, either: messing with units was a way to avoid laws for political grafting purposes. (I need to pay twelve pounds of grain in taxes, per regulations? Well, that gives the local lord nice incentives to mess with what exactly is meant by a "pound" of grain.)

The metric system was introduced specifically to standardize the whole system everywhere and get rid of this mess, and as part of that it *reduces the degrees of freedom in the system*. Which is why inches and feet don't fit in it.

>For whatever reason, scientific effort has focused on refining the metric system.
>It would be hopelessly pigheaded to not use the world's best scientific measurements, or needlessly reduplicate the effort, in updating the standard.
Did you just answer your own hanging question there?

>As I already said, you have to take into account the fact that the English system was already standardized
It wasn't. Go read your history.

>Indeed. They had a well-defined meaning in every town and village. A *different* meaning in every town and village, that is.
I'm going to stop reading there, because you're too ignorant to discuss this, and too stupid to recognize it.

This was the state of affairs in backwards France, for example. England had long since standardized, and had sophisticated (and far superior) industry based on that standardization.

>cubic inches, cubic feet
>chain, furlough, acre
>gallon, slug
>ounces, fluid ounces

I like US measurements but... fuck ounces and fluid ounces. I'll never memorize those and many many are in a cup or a pound.

>I was raised on the metric system, and have learned the US standard system
same here

>it's much better for eyeball estimates
for you


>Eyeball estimates work best by knowing a few units and giving a small-number multiple or division of those.
that's why it's much simpler to notice a store is 30 meters down the street rather than a fuckton (100) feet

>Doesn't seem to happen with US.
Is that because you fuck up all the other numbers, user?

>feet, inches, yards, pounds
statute miles, nautical miles, country miles
ounces avoirdupois, fluid ounces, Troy ounces
jiggers, cups, half-pints, pints, fifths, quarts, gallons, barrels
drops, drams, teaspoons, tablespoons
grains, carats
fathoms, furlongs
acres, sections

>It's no coincidence that the only people who have walked on the moon did so while calculating in feet and pounds.

The Apollo Guidance Computer used the metric system, internally.

original height = 146.6m
perimeter = 1760 cubits (derived from metre-second radian)
metric system and imperial ratios are ancient. homework time

...

yeah, we need a measuring system optimized for dividing by 5, instead of dividing by 3 and 4 and 6.

Base 12 is the best base.

why can't we just use both? also the construction industry utilises some sizes such as 1200mm.

>60 seconds an hour
Only when I enjoy life

>implying zeroes aren't neat and accurate
kek'd

...

do you mean the inferior americans that produce 22% of world gross domestic product?

or went to the moon with pi to 3 digits, feet and lbs?

or the ones that occupy the country the rest of the world wants to get into?

just asking.

it just isnt that big a deal. I have been a design engineer for 30 years and have seen colossal mistakes made in either system. anyone worth a shit can go back and forth easily, depending on what his customer wants.

in the usa we use 8x8x1/2 steel tube. in SI countries they use 200x200x12. but if you measure it, it comes out 208x208x12.7. which is, guess what: 8x8x1/2.

The only real utility that metric has is as a standards system.
Call back when metric 2.0 is invented and the entire system isn't a shoehorned farce of obfuscation.

To clarify by obfuscation, I mean defining base units arbitrarily, self referentially, and independent of physical constants.

Stop making this thread.

Old units of measurement came from times when people didn't have measuring tools, so comparison to everyday objects was used.

Time comes from the babylonians that didn't use based 10.

Now stop.

why> it's an interesting topic

metric is ancient. pendulums.
but it is... based on g

>A correction factor counts as a physical constant
Are you serious right now?

metric is lot moe practical. although i agree that 10 base is shitty. it should be changed to 12 base, and use that base in every units: time,distance, etc

10, 10, 10, 10, 10
>that shit makes no sense
3, 20, 153, 4, 2, 1000, 5
>that is PRACTICAL AS FUCK

You know, there is a reason that carpentry doesn't use thou, and that engineers don't use cups. Forcing disparate interests to share the same units is not beneficial.
The imperial and US customary system/s ensure the work and calculations are done as efficiently and effectively as possible. If a calculation is annoying, fuck it, just make a new unit and normalize its scale.
The base 10 'just makes sense' meme of metric falls apart once you change scales and use mixed dimensional units.

Also, good luck defining engineering material properties in terms of metric. The tests are performed in imperial and then converted to metric. Hard to justify a 'standardized' unit system when all the material science equations are based on what amounts to trial and error statistical analysis. tl;dr both use correction factors, but only one uses obfuscation.

please elaborate sur

Lad i am not form the anglosphere (thanks god) and i use metric and can tell it is a lot more practical, so stop bitching.

>9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom per second

>a microscopic event occuring at over 9gigahertz presumably discovered in the 60's
>9ghz computing wasnt even possible til after 2010

>I always fuck up with zeroes

>they're based on the natural sizes
lmao

I gotta admit, this is some pretty good b8.

Imperial was born from metric, so can be derived from the metre using ratio

New system when?

I fucking hate living in the transition to metric.
I think in liters, pounds, and a hybrid of mm, cm, inches, meters, and miles. Can't wait for it to die off.

...

: *

You mean the Royal Egyptian System?

:3

The metric system is caveman tech. Measuring everything based on how many fingers you have. Tardo.

Base 10 is so fucktarded, the metric system isn't even fundamentally based on it. That second in the speed of light is not a 10 based unit of time. It is from a superior base 12 system.

What other measurements are base 12. Oh, US freedom units.

OK, lesson time, let's take for example the units for space, time and mass: meter m, second s and kilograms kg in the KGS system of the SI.
The prefactor is a multiple of 1000 because od historical motivation, then we have:
nm um mm (m) km Mm Gm
ns us ms (s) ks Ms GS
ng ug mg g (kg) Mg Gg

The prefactors are always the same and they are called: n nano 10^-9, u micro 10^-6(is in fact the letter mi of the Greek alphabet and the historical one), m milli 10^-3, k kilo 10^3, M mega 10^6, G giga 10^9.
These are the most used, maybe not for meter, second and kilogram thou, but for the compound units.
Easy peasy.

In physics of particles for example the velocity is calculated using units divided by c, the speed of light. the metric system does not advocate for the use of meters, seconds and such, but for the prefactors that are multiple of 1000!

Just get good with slugs, there is no excuse to use metric.

I'll extend an olive branch to my dear uncouth amerimutt friends. The imperial unit names sound a lot better than the metric system names in English. See? There's one thing the imperial system does better than the metric system.

you mean whoever built the great pyramid. there is zero evidence they built it

The only useful measurement in metric is the millimeter because it's hard to use thou to visualize, and it is a stupid base unit for real world life scales.

>or went to the moon with pi to 3 digits, feet and lbs?
In scientific or engineering context the metric system is used.

>engineering context the metric system is used
We actually use both US customary and metric. Metric is really only used when a reference chart wasn't produced in imperial units or when a client wants the metric system used.
Industry within the states uses US customary because it is better for calculations and the real world. Metric beats US customary in conversions, but I'll take annoying conversions over annoying calculations any day.
That and when a calculation doesn't work because we don't realize one mixed unit uses lbm and another mixed unit is using lbf. But that only happens because people don't learn the slug properly.

WE WUZ

don't those things have hieroglyphs on them?

>the real world

Na bra, not the great pyramid anyways. Its bare

The fundamental problem with imperial/US standard units is the fact there are so many DIFFERENT units for each measure, whereas for metric/SI there is one.
Take US units of length: inch, foot, yard, mile are the commonly used ones, and then there's furlong, fathom, league, chain, etc...
Metric uses just one: metre. You're using the same units whether you're writing down kilometres or millimetres since the prefix is just short for thousands of/thousandth of/whatever.
It would be okay if they used, for example, the foot as the base unit and then had kilofeet, millifeet, etc. The actual sizes of the measurements don't matter, as long as the system is consistent.

Engineer here. We use US units almost exclusively.

>as long as the system is consistent.
it is, you just don't want to learn the patterns.
What you are describing is the collection of all US customary and Imperial measurements from all of time. No one serious does that.
No one mixes cups and cubic feet. No one mixes miles and leagues.

You use the units which are most appropriate for your task. Carpenters don't use thou, and engineers don't use floz. Machinists don't use fractional inches, and bakers don't use barrels.