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Many if not most Americans have some concept of kilometers and meters, especially anyone who runs, or is involved in sports outside of the big 3 American sports
by ch4s3 4y ago
Many if not most Americans have some concept of kilometers and meters, especially anyone who runs, or is involved in sports outside of the big 3 American sports. We just tend to prefer the imperial, as we grow up using and interacting with it. Inches and feet are just easy to reason about in physical space on a human scale, they're great when you aren't trying to do more complicated math.
- coliveira 4y ago> Inches and feet are just easy to reason about in physical space on a human scale Nah, everyone else in the world measures physical space in metric units without any problem.
- ch4s3 4y agoThank you, I really appreciate this constructive feedback. I obviously get the metric system, and most Americans are pretty familiar. But inches and feet are rooted in physicality. An inch is roughly a finger width, four inches make the (now rarely used measure) hand, and 3 hands is a foot. You can step off roughly accurate feet. I long stride is about 6 feet, or 2 yards. All of these measures divide neatly by 2, 3, and 4. It makes most fractional measures, especially things like 1/16th of an inch easy to work with. I wouldn't use it for science, but for building a table or measuring a rough distance imperial units are super intuitive.