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The imperial system has shortcomings for small units, which means that regular people will encounter grams/millimeters/milliliters in their daily lives, so they

The imperial system has shortcomings for small units, which means that regular people will encounter grams/millimeters/milliliters in their daily lives, so they are effectively using a hybrid system already, which is just the worst of both worlds. Yes, converting is technically trivial, but you still have to reach for a calculator to do it.

wlesieutre 7y ago
>The imperial system has shortcomings for small units Don't forget the medium and large units! I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someone could say "2000 feet" and I didn't have to think about how many miles that means. And our two speed measures of feet per second and miles per hour are close to equivalent (1 fps is about 0.7 mph) but nobody knows that to convert it in their heads. It just happens that 3600 seconds is the same order of magnitude as 5280 feet. Not that metric is totally better in that regard since they're stuck with minutes and seconds too. There's 86,400 seconds in a day, maybe when we're making this big calendar change we can switch it over to 100,000 seconds at the same time. Or we could change miles to be 3600 feet so that feet per seconds and miles per hour are equivalent. Added bonus, that's not too far off a kilometer.
- mlok 7y ago
  For time, I think the equivalent would be the "Internet Time" created 20 years ago : one day is 1000 beats. 1 beat = 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- asavadatti 7y ago
  0.7 and 1 are not close to equivalent even when speaking informally. The difference is the same as driving normal highway speed vs license suspension (or jail) speed
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    I don't mean they're close enough to be interchangeable, just that they're close enough that it's dumb to have separate scales. They're useful for having people understand speeds at different scales, but only because the different scales of units line up stupidly. Of course the effort to change it isn't worth it, it just makes you wish we'd got it right the first time around.
- maxlybbert 7y ago
  One thing I learned from a Disney movie of Goofy driving is that multiplying a speed in miles per hour by 1.5 gives a surprisingly close approximation to feet per second.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  We could also just declare a metric foot to be 1/3 of a meter, and a metric mile to be 1600 meters or 4800 metric feet.
Notorious_BLT 7y ago
I wish the metric system didn't have shortcomings in the medium units, though. There's no (commonly used) parallel to feet in metric. Centimeters are too small for the kind of estimations feet are useful for. That's really the only imperial unit I care about.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  You can use decimetres if you wish (0.1m or 10cm, so about ⅓ foot). In practise this isn't really a shortcoming, so hardly anyone does use them. About the only place I see decimetre markings is depth gauges on rivers/canals/bridges, and rulers used by geologists when photographing a rock formation.
- microtherion 7y ago
  There are decimeters. Not super commonly used, but due to the decimal nature of the system nobody has much difficulty understanding them.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  You're thinking about it wrong. 2 feet is about 600mm or 60 cm or 6 decimeters or 0.6m or 0.06 dekameters. Just pick whatever prefix that gives you the number of significant digits you want. Metric doesn't "lack units", because there's only a single unit for every measure. Instead there's prefixes for every power of ten around human-scale measurements, and for every power of thousand for much smaller and much larger measurements.

wlesieutre 7y ago

>The imperial system has shortcomings for small units Don't forget the medium and large units! I guess miles on their own work fine, but it'd be nice if someone could say "2000 feet" and I didn't have to think about how many miles that means. And our two speed measures of feet per second and miles per hour are close to equivalent (1 fps is about 0.7 mph) but nobody knows that to convert it in their heads. It just happens that 3600 seconds is the same order of magnitude as 5280 feet. Not that metric is totally better in that regard since they're stuck with minutes and seconds too. There's 86,400 seconds in a day, maybe when we're making this big calendar change we can switch it over to 100,000 seconds at the same time. Or we could change miles to be 3600 feet so that feet per seconds and miles per hour are equivalent. Added bonus, that's not too far off a kilometer.

mlok 7y ago
For time, I think the equivalent would be the "Internet Time" created 20 years ago : one day is 1000 beats. 1 beat = 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
asavadatti 7y ago
0.7 and 1 are not close to equivalent even when speaking informally. The difference is the same as driving normal highway speed vs license suspension (or jail) speed
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  I don't mean they're close enough to be interchangeable, just that they're close enough that it's dumb to have separate scales. They're useful for having people understand speeds at different scales, but only because the different scales of units line up stupidly. Of course the effort to change it isn't worth it, it just makes you wish we'd got it right the first time around.
maxlybbert 7y ago
One thing I learned from a Disney movie of Goofy driving is that multiplying a speed in miles per hour by 1.5 gives a surprisingly close approximation to feet per second.
saalweachter 7y ago
We could also just declare a metric foot to be 1/3 of a meter, and a metric mile to be 1600 meters or 4800 metric feet.

Notorious_BLT 7y ago

I wish the metric system didn't have shortcomings in the medium units, though. There's no (commonly used) parallel to feet in metric. Centimeters are too small for the kind of estimations feet are useful for. That's really the only imperial unit I care about.

Symbiote 7y ago
You can use decimetres if you wish (0.1m or 10cm, so about ⅓ foot). In practise this isn't really a shortcoming, so hardly anyone does use them. About the only place I see decimetre markings is depth gauges on rivers/canals/bridges, and rulers used by geologists when photographing a rock formation.
microtherion 7y ago
There are decimeters. Not super commonly used, but due to the decimal nature of the system nobody has much difficulty understanding them.
henrikschroder 7y ago
You're thinking about it wrong. 2 feet is about 600mm or 60 cm or 6 decimeters or 0.6m or 0.06 dekameters. Just pick whatever prefix that gives you the number of significant digits you want. Metric doesn't "lack units", because there's only a single unit for every measure. Instead there's prefixes for every power of ten around human-scale measurements, and for every power of thousand for much smaller and much larger measurements.