Is The Metric System Actually Better? 

You guys are too harsh towards US. They've been using 9mm in schools for a while now.

Metric system mm- millimetre cm- centimetre m- metre km- kilometre Imperial system - Inch - Feet - yard - size of Football field - size of Texas

There are 2 types of countries - those that use metric, and those whose units are federally defined by metric

As an engineering student, with the metric system I was able to find formulas I'd forgotten out of nowhere with a simple dimensional analysis, no arbitrary coefficients, everything is elegant.

Best thing ever in real life: 1 liter of water = 1 kg.

Imperial and metric have something in common: They're both incompatible with imperial

"He despised british units so much so he designed a rocket to fly to england to show them how great the metric system was" i'm dying over here 😂

Hey, fun fact about the temperature in both systems: In Celsius 0°C is the temperature, at which water freezes at sea level. 100°C is the temperature, at which water evaporates. In Fahrenheit 100°F is the body temperature of a sweating horse of a very specific breed, at a very specific time, at a very specific spot in Germany. 0°F is the coldest temperature detected at the winter of 1708/1709 Just saying

1 foot is legally defined as the distance a 9mm bullet can travel through a monster truck and 3 cheeseburgers inside a complete Vacuum

America is moving towards the metric system, one inch at a time

I grew up in South Africa and learned in the Imperial system until I was 12. When we changed to metric everyone in my class cheered! No more adding 33'9 and 3/8" to 21'8 and 25/64"!

It's even more connected than you say. 1 metre was set at 1/10,000,000 the distance from the equator to the poles. (They have since then measured the distance more accurately and it's slightly out.) Also, a cube 10cm x 10cm x 10cm has a volume of 1 litre. 1 litre of water weighs 1 kilogram. At sea level water boils at 100°C and freezes at 0°C.

World: *uses metric system* America: Cheeseburgers per freedom eagle with gun

The metric system is kilometers ahead.

I once saw on an American technical data sheet the unit oz/ sq.m. Crazy!

I love a tiny error, the voiceover says "a lb is 0.435 kg" (9:12) which is just a perfect little example of how easy it is to make mistakes in such a silly conversion system.

I came here to see the imperial system get roasted and I was NOT disappointed

"He designed a rocket to fly to England to show how great the metric system was." Oh god!

There's just a few things you can watch with great satisfaction: Waterfalls, fires, and someone shitting on the imperial system

I'm a French engineer. And We tolerate only one none metric measure : the pint of beer !

Alternative title “ Roasting Imperial System for 12 mins straight “

Short answer: Yes Long answer: Still yes

The biggest advantage of all in SI metric system is that most scientific formulae don't have extraneous constants in them. F = ma just works. F = g m1 m2/r^2 so I don't have to remember a heap of random constants! I tend to do calculations in basic units: m, kg, s etc. that way I don't have factors of 1000 and stuff complicating my calculations. Unfortunately some scientists still hold on to old cgs (not SI) metric units. I wish they would get with the strength and go pure SI but at least they aren't using poundals and slugs... :)

It would be also nice to have similar video about different types of power outlet sockets in different countries.

Don’t even get me started on FAHRENHEIT...

"There are 2 kinds of countries -- Those that use the Metric system and those that used the metric system to go to the moon and later crashed a probe into mars because they were confused by metric units" -Scott Manley

I only use two non metric units, the nautical mile and the knot. they work well in navigation because they easily convert to angles on our planet.

6:21 Not to really bug you but you forgot to add an extra one layer of bolts after the division of intervals to cater for the end of the 1 mile bridge. So that'll be 881 instead. Amounting to 1,762 bolts.

Every time I come the US I have to get used to inches, miles, ounces, liquid ounces, gallons, Fahrenheit... And every time they ask or mention time, I get surprised that they use hours and minutes!

''I aimed for the stars, but sometimes hit London.'' Wernher Von Braun

the mix of units is the absolute best way to guarantee a spectacular failure

Canada switch to the metric system in the mid 70’s, when I was a teenager in the sciences, so I am quite familiar with both. However, when it comes to people’s height (and to a lesser extent, weight), I still calculate metric to imperial for comparison. Everything else I prefer metric.

"He designed a rocket to fly to England to show them how great the metric system was". LOL :-)

I'm here to watch "YES" being stretched to 13 minutes.

I remember at the beginning of my chemical engineering curriculum, we’d receive some easy mass and energy balancing problems that would have mismatched units. One pressure in psi, another in kPa, and one in mmHg for good measure. The purpose of this was to ensure we understood dimensional analysis and could deal with any units, but of course this was always frustrating for us students because it was usually unrelated to the course content. Eventually once the classes got a lot harder and the equations got longer, we never strayed from the metric system. However, when I entered industry I realized exactly why my earlier professors gave us those annoying problems… many industries cling to the imperial system for dear life. There are definitely some newer start-ups and facilities now that are being smart about their units because its much easier to keep everyone on the same system if you’re starting fresh. However, basically all the old plants religiously use the imperial system; its deeply engrained and difficult to transition because it certainly does cost a lot of time and manpower to replace all of the necessary instrumentation and train the operators and technicians. The benefit to investing in a complete overhaul of the instrumentation, SOPs, manuals, training, etc. to use the metric system is often going to be negligible for day-to-day operations. It can even be detrimental if it isn’t done properly, leading to the same errors discussed in this video that occur when transitioning between two unit systems. So really, you can’t blame American engineers. It’s just not our fault, we’d prefer to use metric because we’re one of the few demographics that appreciate it’s ease of use. However the people that run the businesses and are down on the ground don’t think that way. They’ve gotten along fine with their imperial units and as such require us to produce products and services that utilize them. In academia and highly scientific and technical industries it is different because a great percentage of the working population in those fields do understand the value to the metric system.

This is not even a question, but let's whatch the video to learn the obvious answer

Alternate title: "Real Engineering roasts Imperial for 13 minutes"

Is metric better? Me, who is an american electrical engineer: YES.

For me its the ability to do stuff like 'oh i dont have a 1L measure' but i have a scale so i can measure out 1kg of water and thanks to the metric system its 1L of water. I actually had to do that once!!

"Is the metric system actually better?" Short answer: yes Long answer: absolutely yes

“So great, that he designed a rocket to fly to England to show them” shows a picture of a V-2 rocket lmao this had me rolling

When my friend Miles traveled to Europe, he preferred to be called Kilometers.

I agree. I'm an American, and I don't use mixed units. METRIC ONLY!! I even intentionally use metric units around other people to expose them to it.

Whole world: density of gold is 19.3 g/cc America: gold is about 20 times denser than a duck

'Is The Metric System Actually Better?' Short Answer: Yes Long Answer: Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees

There’s another point: when converting imperial one hardly use all significant digits, so there’s always some error which can accumulate. That doesn’t happen with metric: 1 km is exactly 1000 m, not only the conversation is easier to make, it is always precise.

When I was learning to fly it seemed crazy that the (American) planes we were flying measured aircraft, passenger, baggage and fuel weights in pounds, but they measured fuel volume in US gallons (which bizarrely are not even the same as an Imperial gallon!), and we purchased our fuel in litres - lots of room for error there, even in light aircraft! Fortunately some light aircraft owners have been sensible enough to have the aircraft weights converted to kg and the fuel dipsticks to litres, removing most of the potential errors.

To remember how many feet in a mile, remember five tomatoes. Five To mAte Oes sounds like Five Two Eight Oh, and there are 5280 feet in a mile. To remember how many meters in a kilometer, remember 1000, because the Metric system wasn't invented by drunk mathematicians rolling dice.

Any video that makes fun of the imperial system is a good video.

The Math is just so mich easier. You can simply control yourself or develop fitting formulas based on the SI units. Also, up-/downscaling etc. The imperial unit system had its time when people didnt need precise results in their every day life. But then people thought about a new standardized system that makes math, trade and production a lot easier and a lot easier to learn (which was a big problem back in the days). Its just a unit system made for math.

When I first saw this video 3 years ago I was all for ‘murica and got slightly offended by this video. Now that I’m in my junior year of mechanical engineering when I’m given a problem with imperial units it pisses me off. It’s so much more needlessly difficult

The imperial is so bad that they gave up and started using Football fields as a measurement unit

Respect to the thought of unified measures, but there's a bit of this script that reads like a Scientology manual. That was a lot of airs about dividing 5280 by 3 (for an example) to go on and note favorably that "distance travelled by a ray of light in 1 in [the very not round measure of C]'s of a second," and then to add this about such seconds triumphantly being endowed with a conversion from the empirically-reliable frequency of hyperfine structure transition in caesium. There isn't anything quintessential about either the distance or the time. Does anyone not forget that like the dozen subunits of a foot, 360 was a useful (for people doing actual calculating, not just moving decimals) stand-in for the number of days in a year, and that again fractions (not decimals) were the thought humanity was creating space for in deigning that 3 * 4 * 5 would be the nice number of seconds in the next bigger thing. At minimum, given the fact that a second is every bit as invented as a pace, they could have cleaned it up-to the 10 billion Hz mark-like they did with establishing metres not-quite-accurately as a 10 millionth of a quarter circumferential ring along one of Earth's meridians (albeit not through Greenwich). Now, like good physicists, we're gonna use a frictionless vacuum, one without gravity wells or time dilation, then, in principle just say "sure" with caesium anchoring instead of hydrogen for now. Very well, go set your metre based on that distance light travels in the so-defined second (a right 300 real-world kilometres, rounded), and we have a start. But you've quashed the idea of an outward-facing, legally-defined regime for interfacing with the metric-SI-system (that you have been oddly avoidant of using the proper name for, given it's a piece about standards). Here, you've essentially called it a gaffe that Americans take ownership of one thing whilst respecting the existence of something else-except that the orthodoxy of SI is based exactly on some basket of ad-hoc units being back-converted (and recalculated not rarely) from physics of the actual universe until messily they fit. It isn't as though anyone sat divining the measure of energy released in neutron decay or determining about how many nonadecoPlanck-lengths were in this metre as I volunteered to have it defined above. The thinkers all, up into this century-and using their best tools and insights-took imperfect measurements to apply to the things of greatest concern to them. Multiple "base" units and systems and conversions were proposed-some were implemented-and a select few were named for this great metric (system) whereby we contemplate our universe. Even this traditional list had to be paired down as interconvertability (that is, into derived units) was recognized. And again, even the certified list of base units (not the mole, though, which isn't fundamental at all) is not axiomatic. We could be stating all distances as being a scalar expression in terms of light-seconds, and it would be accurate. But, more importantly, we can define time according to a speed and a distance, setting (normal) ice crystal units for distance and counting all measures of time as a ratio to that in which light traverses said unit crystal of ice in such medium. It wouldn't be easy because it's so bleedingly fast as a basis, and it wouldn't be kind to astronomy since the average place in the universe quite approximates a vacuum better than it does the lid on a truly cold winter's lake, but it is not that committee has now arbitrated that Cs is the archetypical element, excepting its 39 diverse ways of not being atomically stable to allow calibrated time measurement. Yes, they were standardizing. They took a historical measure-each one in turn-tried to make it make scientific sense, reforged it to measure against an unwitting property of the universe whenever it couldn't be manufactured out of the set of previous ones; rinse and repeat. Your video could have said it thus: base ten good; minimal number of units optimal. I think the very existence of scientific notation and the unfathomability of counting hands in picoAstronomical Units (that's a ring-figer-nail thickness less than 15 cm) belies the fact that there is no meaningful interchangability betwixt the extrema of quantifiers, large and small, in a human context. It is charming to talk about the sun as though it was serving up energy relative to bars of dark chocolate. (1.5 * 10^20 bars with "100%" cacao of the 100 g size each second is some serious wattage!) It is not, however, going to save a world that uses (big) calories-without a passing thought for their rightful prefix-to garner German accents and get directly on about taking our large treats only while with docility accounting them at over 2½ million (SI-approved) joules toward our waistlines. Math with big orders of magnitude, steps, conversions & cancellations, and calculators does benefit at least one short ton from ditching both the standard system and the old Imperial in favor of decimalisation. The point above is valid to science, to engineering, and even by extension into the world of design. It is not, however, enlightened here to take the view that ratios and proportions in the human mind will ever naturally be conceptualized neither as with a half nor as relative to an item present or to the body and internal workings of the self. I can train my eye to detect an increment, 9 down from 10, but living things are very much stuck with being rooted in aggregations, divisions, and comparisons of things more elegant to the understanding than a numeric part of the 5th power of 10 of something no less arbitrary (out of its context) than the world at hand. I'll imagine a world where we repress the urge to drink liquid without a graduated vessel or to think of temperature of that drink being too hot with entirely different connotation than the temperature of the room, and one where I intuitively measure the rise from the ground to where I've taken a seat in centimeters rather than whether my knees sit high or hang over. Still, I expect before you come after us to decimalise ring sizes to a proper millimeter around, you'll at least consider getting on board with champagne in keeping with only the moment of an astronomical new year and getting Celsius fixed whereas most of the Earth is seawater anyway and most of the universe might have us ditch the metric system in favor of Kelvins.

As a graduate Electric Engineer, ALL my studies were in Metric as all electrical units are metric- UN Standard (MkSA). Using the archaic "Imperial " units is quite simply ridiculous.

You know a system is outdated when the country that invented it doesn't even use it as its primary system of measurement.

You forgot another important unit in the US measurement system: "the football field" but of course not the football game every other country plays 😁😁

I grew up with metric, and as an engineer i grimace at time… 60seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 24hrs per day…. Why??? It’s so painful to have been left out.

'these units are the language of the universe' is only partially true, its the relationship between properties that are important rather than the specific units used to represent those relationships - this to me says that there is something more fundamental to relative representations than decimal numeric representations.

5.2k americans got triggered... Is this even how they count people? Like, isn't someone 0.85632 feet or something?

"Is the metric system actually better?" 95.75% of the world population: Yes.

I studied mechanical engineering in Venezuela, we use here the metric system here but most of the text books we use to study use the imperial system, so I learned both and I'm very much used to both. But I never work in both systems at the time, if I get data in I use to convert all into one system and then I start solving problems, I do not prefer one or the other I just use the one that suits me for each problem, for example when I design and calculate gearboxes I tend to prefer the imperial cause all the tables and graphics use it.

Drug addiction was a serious problem already when imperial system was invented

"Is The Metric System Actually Better?" Short answer: yes Long answer: YEEEEEEEEEEeeEEEeeeEEEeeeSSSSS

"We choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard. And we use imperial just to make it harder." JFK, maybe.

The US uses a 2000 lb ton while British Imperial uses a 2240 lb ton, so even within imperial units you have to specify if its british or american.

Henry I of England was attributed to passing the law that the foot was to be as long as a person's own foot - makes perfect sense because every person's foot is exactly the same size. Also inch derived from the Roman uncia ("twelfth"). I measured my foot so my inch is 21,66mm :)

The Alabama Rocket man story killed me as a german 🤣

I thought the "football fields" units is the most superior...

Yes. It is. The us and Myanmar are the only places measuring with primitive units, their feet, their hands and elbows.

The fact that as an european i have to learn the imperial sistem to work in aereonautics angers me on a substomic level

'Imperial is a convoluted mess of measurement units invented by people who married their cousins' - Real Engineering, 2020

Omfg the roasts. I started using metric in my chem class and I was shocked by how EASY it was to use, so intuative, no random ass numbers to remember. 5280 feet my ass...

If we want to stick to decimal number system, then the units should be commensurate to 10. That is why metric makes sense, and imperial doesn't.

this was hella intertaining

The "so, on his gap year, he built a rocket that flew to the UK to show them how great the metric system is" made me lmao

Everyone knows that metric is pound for pound a better system

In Canada, I grew up with both systems. The official conversion took place in 1980 and all my scientific text books were in metric. I'd say I am pretty comfortable in most metric units. I do however, still use feet to measure a person's height, pounds to measure a person's weight. Occasionally, I will reference 500g of hamburger to one lb of hamburger, however imprecise.

What's half of 2322mm? What's half of 7' 7 27/64"? Teacher's waiting...

Imagine learning thermodynamics in imperial units, goddamn...

It's even absurd that someone still uses the imperial measures (measures, it's not a System as there are no direct relations between size/volume/weigh that can be made share a unique baseline).

Hex wrenches in millimiters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.... (some set may include 1.5 and 2.5 mm) Hex wrenches in imperial: 0.05", 1/16", 5/64", 3/32", 7/64", 1/8", 9/64", 5/32".... are you fu**ing kidding me?

I haven't watched the video yet, but based on the fluid mechanics homework I did earlier today, I can say the metric system is absolutely, without a doubt, 10000% better. If I have to try to differentiate between lb-force and lb-mass again, I'm gonna lose my shit. also, why is the most used measure of pressure not in the same units as the most used measure of length/area? Also also, who decided that water should have a density of 1.94? God this system makes every calculation so much harder than it needs to be.

Choosing to use imperial instead of a metric system nowadays just sounds like navigating using a position of the sun while you have a compass in your pocket.

I love that we can hear in his voice how he's just trying to remain chill and calm but deep inside wants to scream and shout on how stupid the Imperial system is LMAO

" Freedom, 'Murica, Guns, PEW PEW, OOHRAH " bro im ded

Working on a project that uses both systems would be more frustrating than any torture on earth. That comparison is absurdly unrelated too just because to depict how bad the situation is

The imperial system is still used in Australia (and probably other places around the world) as a method of exaggeration. There are common phrases such as "its miles away" and "we missed it by an inch" that are used all the time.

“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade-which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing

The most ironic part of this is that the US tried switching to metric directly after the metric system was invented and only failed because the guy that was supposed to carry the kilogram to the US got killed by pirates.

As a good Brazilian I immediately change every game possible to metric system, every time I see distance measured in Miles or speed in Miles/hour I wanna punch someone's face.

One thing I don't get about those new definitions of the base SI units is the crazy circular reasoning.. like, the second is defined by Planck's constant times something.. but it's not like Planck's constant was given us by some superior being engraved in a stone tablet.. Planck's constant was defined centuries ago by the then-current definition of a second. So, we're defining the current second to be the same as the centuries-old second via a detour around Planck. Where is that an improvement? Who says we measured or defined it correctly back then? Perhaps nature meant the speed of light to be 300M m/s, but we measured it slightly off a century ago, and have been taken the 299,79...M m/s as granted ever since, and never changed it because of its circular definition?

There's a reason why american scientist uses the metric system

So basically Metric system is that hot, sexy and smart girl with high standards and Imperial system is inbred girl from Alabama that is married to her cousin

I was a machinist for 12 years or so, then moved into design. Machine shop we use imperial, Design we used metric system. 30 years later that seems to be the same. Now i like to watch video's on engine building and some are in the US and some are in other countries. One thing i noticed, most use the metric system except when its really tight tolerances then they use hundred thousandths of an inch. Is that preference or is there a reason and maybe that is why Nasa did it back in the day. To me it really doesn't matter, they both seem viable. If you look at automotive in the US now, they use liter to describe the size of an engine, but horse power to describe the power it makes.

An important problem with using imperial units internationally - in particular in Europe - is this: inches, feet, furlongs etc already exist as standard in European countries. They have existed for ages - and they have *different sizes* from the Imperial versions. So if you say "inch" in German jurisdiction - it legally does not mean 2.54mm. It means something else and this something else can even be different from town to town. So the Inch only has the expected length within the "Empire". In other jurisdictions it legally has other lengths. This was the main reason for introducing the metric system. -and that reason is still very valid.

“Imperial: invented by people who married their cousins”, i was laughing so hard…

"Because imperial is a convoluted mess of measurement units, invented by people who married their cousins" ded.

This video made me laugh louder and more often than most comedy videos.

The video: "Is The Metric System Actually Better?" Short answer: "Yes" Long answer: "Yes but in 12 minutes and 52 seconds."

Is the metric system actually better? Us: that building 4.20 football fields tall