4 ms·

To those who cling to customary units because... 1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used t

by beloch 9mo ago

To those who cling to customary units because... 1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like. 2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there are awkward numbers baked into the system. e.g. 5280 feet in a mile. 128 ounces in a gallon. 3. "It's too much trouble to change." You're already using metric units. U.S. customary units have, metrologically, been defined in terms of metric units since the Mendenhall order of 1893[1]. i.e. A meter is defined in terms of how far light can travel in a period of time defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium. If you needed to know exactly how long a meter is for a very precise measurement, a reference meter could be produced in a lab by aliens who have no idea what a meter is by using this definition. No such definition exists for a foot or yard. Nobody maintains physical reference yards (the old-school method) anymore. If you want those aliens to measure out a yard precisely, you tell them how to measure out a meter and then tell them 1 yard = 0.9144 m. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order

prmph 9mo ago
Yeah, those people should also think about the fact that even the customary units die-hard do not use micro-feet, milli-feet, or nano-feet, etc.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  A slightly more esoteric Imperial unit is "mils", for thousandths of an inch. 1 mil = 0.001 inch. Which means 1 mil = 25.4 micrometers if we also want to use a non-traditional meter measurement.
bigstrat2003 9mo ago
> You're already using metric units. No we aren't. It doesn't matter what the units are defined as, that is not what determines which units we are using.
- acdha 9mo ago
  In many cases we are, though. A ton of machined things use metric units (and thus need metric tools), and that’s spreading into a lot of other areas like medicine and food packaging. It’s nowhere near absolute but the trend is noticeable.
rconti 9mo ago
Counterpoint to #1, celsius increments are too large. I laugh every time I see a thermostat in a car or home that needs to have steps like 20, 20.5, 21, 21.5.. :)
- nine_k 9mo ago
  Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C? I suspect even the heating element is not that precise, let alone the actual room temperature. They only case in daily practice where 1°C is too large is the difference between normal body temperature (36.5°C) and mild fever (37.0°C), but thermometers have to be graduated in much smaller subdivisions anyway.
  - cogman10 9mo ago
    > Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C? Yeah, it's noticeable. That 0.5C move is roughly a 1F move. And there's definitely a noticeable difference between 71F, 72F, and 73F. But I'd say that it ultimately only matters in human comfort and only when you are talking about room temps. Once you get outside that 70->75 range the exactness starts mattering a lot less. 80 and 85 both feel hot. 65 and 60 both feel cold.
- scoofy 9mo ago
  I mean, it's arbitrary. I've lived in a Fahrenheit country and a Celsius country and both systems work fine. Resolution issues exist for both systems (you can still benefit from decimals in Fahrenheit for coffee and tea brewing) I prefer Fahrenheit because it's based around the human, but it really doesn't matter, and it's probably better long term to have measurements that are not based around the human condition, but we're talking about benefits to society tens of thousands of years from now, rather than today.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  How is that a counterpoint to #1? By that same logic, inches are too big an increment so it's hilarious every time fraction of one is used. 15/16ths? lololol!
cogman10 9mo ago
Temperature is the worst metric unit to pick for this. Both the imperial and metric versions of temperature are completely arbitrary. It's really baffling to me that THIS is the one that most people talking about metric superiority cling to. Where metric shines is when you talk about subunits like mg vs g vs kg. You don't do that with temperature almost ever. So so what if water boils at 212F vs 100C? Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse. Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.
- mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
  (A standard horse in standard health, of course).
  - cogman10 9mo ago
    I mean, say what you will, but a horse is likely to have a similar body temperature regardless their location on the planet. The same can't be said of boiling water. Pretty normal elevations make pretty big changes in water boiling temperature. You can ultimately also average out temperatures for multiple horses to get pretty close to that 100F. A better pin would have been something like the melting point of Gallium. Something that hardly changes with a change of pressure.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse. I mean, every unit is arbiturary. But we need to pick something. I don't have any love for either, but F is the easiest to pick fun at when none of the standard temperatures make any sense. 32 for freezing water, 212 for boiing, 98.6 for human temperature? The 0 and 100 scale were based on the freezing point of some particular saltwater mixture and 90 degrees for human body temperature (which was corrected and then the scale updated to get to the modern temperature).
nine_k 9mo ago
"Customary units" are a varied bunch. The inch-foot-yard-mile scale are not uniform, and not easy to calculate. Their only convenience is easy divisibility by 3. The practical example of uniform scale of this kind is seconds-minutes-hours, which, I suppose, go all the way down to the Sumerian 60-based scale. The mm-cm-m-km are much easier in practice. Sub-inch units are an honest binary system, and as such is pretty practical. The fact that it's written as a ratio of decimal numbers is sometimes unhelpful though, comparing 7/16" and 1/2" takes either mental gymnastics or memorization. Millimeters are somehow more convenient here, but not by such a large margin as with inch-foot-yard scale. The Fahrenheit scale is uselessly arbitrary; 0°F does not match anything useful, and 100°F is not that useful either. The only mile that makes sense is the nautical mile, 1 nm matches 1" of arc on the map / globe, the same way as 1 km is 1/40,000th of the arc.
- AngryData 9mo ago
  0F is useful in areas where they salt roads because thats the temperature many salts stop being effective and previously good road might turn to ice sheets. But it isn't a good reason all by itself.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    How hard is it to remember -17° C when that's something you grew up with since childhood though? As a trade off, you get 0° C for water freezing and you don't have to remember 32°F for water freezing instead. Or you remember all 4 of those if you leave near a borders.
    - AngryData 9mo ago
      I would argue that -17C for brine water is far more difficult to remember than 32 for pure water freezing, 32 is an incredibly common number in fractional measures, but I will concede the point because that seems like more of a happy accident than intent. The biggest problem I have is I don't see either as inherently better, both are relative scales defined by easy to setup but completely arbitrary measures that lacks any real relevance to modern life. We could of defined or scaled our thermometers based on the boiling and freezing points of mercury and nothing would really change, just shifting some numbers around and then still making another absolute scale that can actually be used for any sort of decent thermal calculations.
psadauskas 9mo ago
I read a study many years ago, I haven't been able to find it for awhile. It took people who had grown up using each system, and asked them to estimate things just by guessing. For example, "How long is that wall?" or "How far is it from here to the post office?" or "How heavy is this paperweight?". People who'd grown up using customary were significantly more accurate in their guesses. The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters. Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats. They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile". Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.
- asdff 9mo ago
  It makes sense. Curling my finger it is pretty much dead on 1 inch from the tip to the first joint. My foot is a little shorter than 1 foot, but in shoes, pacing it out one foot after another, it is nearly dead on as well. A lot of people measure using anatomy with conventional units.
- johnea 9mo ago
  That sounds like total bullshit to me...

by beloch 9mo ago

prmph 9mo ago

Yeah, those people should also think about the fact that even the customary units die-hard do not use micro-feet, milli-feet, or nano-feet, etc.

fragmede 9mo ago
A slightly more esoteric Imperial unit is "mils", for thousandths of an inch. 1 mil = 0.001 inch. Which means 1 mil = 25.4 micrometers if we also want to use a non-traditional meter measurement.

bigstrat2003 9mo ago

> You're already using metric units. No we aren't. It doesn't matter what the units are defined as, that is not what determines which units we are using.

acdha 9mo ago
In many cases we are, though. A ton of machined things use metric units (and thus need metric tools), and that’s spreading into a lot of other areas like medicine and food packaging. It’s nowhere near absolute but the trend is noticeable.

rconti 9mo ago

Counterpoint to #1, celsius increments are too large. I laugh every time I see a thermostat in a car or home that needs to have steps like 20, 20.5, 21, 21.5.. :)

nine_k 9mo ago
Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C? I suspect even the heating element is not that precise, let alone the actual room temperature. They only case in daily practice where 1°C is too large is the difference between normal body temperature (36.5°C) and mild fever (37.0°C), but thermometers have to be graduated in much smaller subdivisions anyway.
- cogman10 9mo ago
  > Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C? Yeah, it's noticeable. That 0.5C move is roughly a 1F move. And there's definitely a noticeable difference between 71F, 72F, and 73F. But I'd say that it ultimately only matters in human comfort and only when you are talking about room temps. Once you get outside that 70->75 range the exactness starts mattering a lot less. 80 and 85 both feel hot. 65 and 60 both feel cold.
scoofy 9mo ago
I mean, it's arbitrary. I've lived in a Fahrenheit country and a Celsius country and both systems work fine. Resolution issues exist for both systems (you can still benefit from decimals in Fahrenheit for coffee and tea brewing) I prefer Fahrenheit because it's based around the human, but it really doesn't matter, and it's probably better long term to have measurements that are not based around the human condition, but we're talking about benefits to society tens of thousands of years from now, rather than today.
fragmede 9mo ago
How is that a counterpoint to #1? By that same logic, inches are too big an increment so it's hilarious every time fraction of one is used. 15/16ths? lololol!

cogman10 9mo ago

Temperature is the worst metric unit to pick for this. Both the imperial and metric versions of temperature are completely arbitrary. It's really baffling to me that THIS is the one that most people talking about metric superiority cling to. Where metric shines is when you talk about subunits like mg vs g vs kg. You don't do that with temperature almost ever. So so what if water boils at 212F vs 100C? Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse. Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.

mitthrowaway2 9mo ago
(A standard horse in standard health, of course).
- cogman10 9mo ago
  I mean, say what you will, but a horse is likely to have a similar body temperature regardless their location on the planet. The same can't be said of boiling water. Pretty normal elevations make pretty big changes in water boiling temperature. You can ultimately also average out temperatures for multiple horses to get pretty close to that 100F. A better pin would have been something like the melting point of Gallium. Something that hardly changes with a change of pressure.
johnnyanmac 9mo ago
>Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse. I mean, every unit is arbiturary. But we need to pick something. I don't have any love for either, but F is the easiest to pick fun at when none of the standard temperatures make any sense. 32 for freezing water, 212 for boiing, 98.6 for human temperature? The 0 and 100 scale were based on the freezing point of some particular saltwater mixture and 90 degrees for human body temperature (which was corrected and then the scale updated to get to the modern temperature).

nine_k 9mo ago

"Customary units" are a varied bunch. The inch-foot-yard-mile scale are not uniform, and not easy to calculate. Their only convenience is easy divisibility by 3. The practical example of uniform scale of this kind is seconds-minutes-hours, which, I suppose, go all the way down to the Sumerian 60-based scale. The mm-cm-m-km are much easier in practice. Sub-inch units are an honest binary system, and as such is pretty practical. The fact that it's written as a ratio of decimal numbers is sometimes unhelpful though, comparing 7/16" and 1/2" takes either mental gymnastics or memorization. Millimeters are somehow more convenient here, but not by such a large margin as with inch-foot-yard scale. The Fahrenheit scale is uselessly arbitrary; 0°F does not match anything useful, and 100°F is not that useful either. The only mile that makes sense is the nautical mile, 1 nm matches 1" of arc on the map / globe, the same way as 1 km is 1/40,000th of the arc.

AngryData 9mo ago
0F is useful in areas where they salt roads because thats the temperature many salts stop being effective and previously good road might turn to ice sheets. But it isn't a good reason all by itself.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  How hard is it to remember -17° C when that's something you grew up with since childhood though? As a trade off, you get 0° C for water freezing and you don't have to remember 32°F for water freezing instead. Or you remember all 4 of those if you leave near a borders.
  - AngryData 9mo ago
    I would argue that -17C for brine water is far more difficult to remember than 32 for pure water freezing, 32 is an incredibly common number in fractional measures, but I will concede the point because that seems like more of a happy accident than intent. The biggest problem I have is I don't see either as inherently better, both are relative scales defined by easy to setup but completely arbitrary measures that lacks any real relevance to modern life. We could of defined or scaled our thermometers based on the boiling and freezing points of mercury and nothing would really change, just shifting some numbers around and then still making another absolute scale that can actually be used for any sort of decent thermal calculations.

psadauskas 9mo ago

I read a study many years ago, I haven't been able to find it for awhile. It took people who had grown up using each system, and asked them to estimate things just by guessing. For example, "How long is that wall?" or "How far is it from here to the post office?" or "How heavy is this paperweight?". People who'd grown up using customary were significantly more accurate in their guesses. The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters. Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats. They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile". Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.

asdff 9mo ago
It makes sense. Curling my finger it is pretty much dead on 1 inch from the tip to the first joint. My foot is a little shorter than 1 foot, but in shoes, pacing it out one foot after another, it is nearly dead on as well. A lot of people measure using anatomy with conventional units.
johnea 9mo ago
That sounds like total bullshit to me...