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The point of the SI system is not that one meter is "better" than one foot. It's that we picked one subjective point of reference and then made almost all the o
by steamrolled 1y ago
The point of the SI system is not that one meter is "better" than one foot. It's that we picked one subjective point of reference and then made almost all the other units related to that in a straightforward way and scaled with a common set of prefixes.
In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit, except for consistency for international standards and trade. But if you're doing anything engineering-related, your life is simpler if you don't need conversion factors to move between liters, meters, joules, watts, amperes, volts, ohms, and so on.
And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is anchored to SI.
- kergonath 1y ago> And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is anchored to SI. Inches are defined relative to the SI as well.
- throwanem 1y agoEven when we use inches, they're frequently themselves metricated via division by 1,000 to produce the "thou." This is an extremely strong convention; I have one (inexpensive) digital caliper that can read in fractional inches, but every such tool I own reads in both millimeters and thou. I do think it's funny all these folks insisting metric is so humanist seem never to have noticed which of their finger joints is an inch long. For me that's the second of the little finger, but I have large squarish peasant hands. As for the rest, treating a centimeter as 10/25 of an inch and vice versa seems to work well enough for measurements not requiring particular precision, or in other words anything I'd be comfortable doing without a caliper. Where's the trouble, really?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lostlogin 1y agoWhere does the ‘humanist’ bit end? Should we go back to fathoms, furlongs, chains, drams and bushels? This was settled a long time ago for the vast majority of the word.
- throwanem 1y agoIf we should find they serve us better, why not?
- nancyminusone 1y ago>bushels Someone hasn't been to an apple orchard recently.
- bregma 1y agoIt's far more impressive to express gravity in units of stone furlong per fortnight squared. It's 7.14 x 10^10. Makes gravity on Jupiter look puny.
- throwanem 1y agoIt's that plus or minus about three orders, sure.
- fuzztester 1y agoJust for fun, check the yojana and related Indian measures: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojana https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojana https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement_systems_in_India https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement_syste...
- throwanem 1y agoNow, ironically given I'm for all serious purposes an English monoglot, you're speaking my language. Give me lakh and crore! Give me weights and measures where I can feel the history. Just like my mad 5,280-foot (1,360-yard) mile, which I love. And give me also the precise rational tenths-and-tens units, too, of course, for when we need accuracy more than soul. I work in thou all the time! All I've really been saying is, there's a place in the world for both ways of doing things. Why's everyone else so hellbent on having exactly one or the other?
- bregma 1y ago> In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit That's not entirely true. An American driving across the Canadian border on an interstate can automatically go from 55 to 100. That's almost twice as much.
- throwanem 1y agoNo it isn't. Our speedos are denominated both ways, it's cheaper, and I drive a Nissan with a V6 and paddle shifters. Not that that's much in any real sense! But neither is a Piper Archer, and those also have enough power to make 100kph feel extremely tame. It's not a high bar, is what I'm saying.