This American YouTuber “can’t” use metric. Here’s why I do now 

Metric is actually very easy to visualize for Americans. 1 M16A4 is exactly 1 meter long, so 10 meters is just 10 M16A4s in a straight line

As a swede living just below the 60th north parallel, I think Celsius is very useful for weather, because it's really important to know if there's gonna be ice on the roads or not. Below zero - drive carefully. I think freezing is one of the most important weather related aspects you need to know, so it makes sense having a system designed around freezing.

Regarding the distance, when it comes to small, precise measurements, think carpentering, nothing beats centimeters and milimeters.

Some people wrongly assume that metric vs imperial is a debate about "which one is better". It is not. It is a debate about standard vs non-standard. If you use a different system than 95% of other people in the world, you are handicapping yourself. It's the same thing about driving on the left side of the road.

There really is nothing more frustrating than trying to follow a recipe and finding 3 different answers for how much a cup is.

As someone who was raised on metric and doesn't understand imperial, I also do the "ah yes, 2 meters is slightly longer than me"

I'm European but lived in the US for three months. I made the decision to try to learn imperial just for convenience while I was there, here are my takes on my experience the other way around: - temperature was weirdly easy because after looking the Fahrenheit score every morning and then going out, you get a lot of reference points, after three months it wasn't completely intuitive but I was definitely NOT converting everything. - I despised the cup system, do I need to say more. I think I found a scale somewhere and just did everything in grams - distance was very similar to what Evan said: I converted miles and had no intuitive understanding how much e.g. 5 miles were. Inches were a little easier bc European tape measures always have centimetres and inches - volumes was so weird: Why do you need something as big as a gallon as reference point? Gallons were at least easy to convert but I never understood ounces at all.

It's similar to learning a language, you learn much faster when you stop translating things and are instead immersed in them. Temperature was the easiest for me to learn and I no longer understand Fahrenheit temperatures. I still struggle with people's height and weight in metric terms though.

Actually the Celsius scale is pretty good for weather, as others have pointed out as well, because having a scale from "Ice is forming" at 0°C to "You can't survive outside without major precautions" at 50°C is kinda neat.

"We're not water, we're humans!" Well, humans are made of 80% water, so knowing when the water freezes or boils in our bodies is pretty useful for survival to be honest.

Metric IS used extensively in the US in science. It makes calculations so much easier because all the units are based on one another. For those who work in those fields, we tend to find metric intuitive at work and imperial in day to day activities. This just come from experience. In medicine I struggle with body temp in metric. But the Cardio thoracic surgeons all use metric because all of their literature was published using celsius. With regards to cooking, this is less a comparison of metric vs imperial and more mass vs volume. Weight would make more sense even in imperial. It is a pedantic point that grams are mass and pounds are weight and those are not the same thing.

I partly agree with what you're saying about Fahrenheit. But only partly. The main thing I like about Celsius, is that when it's in the negative, you'll have frost and snow, and when it's in the positive, you'll have rain. And around zero, like from -4 to +4 or so, there is a danger of having water on ice, or other very slippery conditions. I do agree that Fahrenheit gives more specificity. But I feel that when it comes to weather, it is more important to have a MAJOR distinction between when it rains and when it snows.

On the whole "Freedom Units" thing. Actually, the US Armed Forces are completly metric. They did the transition decades ago.

I used to think the metric system made no sense and that I would never use it. However, I later went on to do a science degree and I spent a lot of time actually measuring things and doing calculations in metric, and occasionally in imperial, and as time passed, switching back to imperial stopped being a relief and became gravely irritating because, once I finally got a bit accustomed to what the measurements meant, doing calculations in metric was SO much easier!

Kilograms is not a measurement of weight. It is a measurment of mass. The metric unit for weight is newtons.

I really appreciate the way you're looking to the two perspectives on the measuring systems. I never thought how embedded these can be in both cultures, and how a choice is made for you when you get born in one of the two.

What Americans who say things like "The ship has sailed on metric in the US" seem to be neglecting is that all the other countries that changed from imperial to metric faced all the same challenges and did so in the end. My parents were of the generation that had metric come in while they were in school (Metrication of Canada occurred from the 70s through to about 1985). In that time curricula had to be changed, road signs had to be changed, and all the other stuff. Was it difficult for some people? Hell yes, my grand parents still tend to talk in feet, miles, oz, etc. rather than meters or grams but it really isn't that difficult to adjust. The 'hardest' part is actually changing all the road signs. And really that can be accomplished over a stretch of a decade as signs need to be or should be) replaced so it isn't even a huge lump sum cost. And overall changing to metric would only hurt the US in the short term and would be more than made up for in the ease of cooperating or trading with other nations (and of course, plenty of treaties that the US has with other nations are already expressed in metric).

Even in the US, scientists and many engineers use the metric system. One thing that I might never understand, being from Germany, is screws and tools. All these fractions of inches instead of full numbers that come pretty close to metric but are off by like ½ mm. The good thing in metric is that every unit counts up and down in tens, hundreds, or thousands. From millimeters to kilometer or from gramm to tons. Everything can be easily divided or multiplied. You can easily go down to super small units. Like milli, micro, nano, pico.

I have not moved between countries, but in 2002, my country adopted the euro as the official currency. For some time people were comparing prices in terms of the old currency, but these days it's pretty much forgotten. The Eurozone in general is a pretty good recent case study of implementing a unit change that drastically affects people's everyday lives.

Great points. As a 40 year carpenter in the US, imperial is in my blood. However, ever since getting a 3D printer seven years ago, I have seen the benefits of the metric system. Now, I have both imperial and metric measurements tape measures, rulers, etc. Actually, using the metric system installing trim and custom carpentry has great benefits and speed. No figuring out fractions. However, I have never gotton here in the US when things are compared to a football field. Average person probably has never been to a football field. Excellent, thank you.

Also love that 1l of water weighs 1kg, so it’s easy to convert the volume to weight when cooking. Also picking up a 1l water bottle and going “I’m lifting 1 kilo” is kind of nice. But it only works with water and other fluids that are similar to water (i.e. juice, etc)

I'm Greek and while I was too little to remember it myself, my parents lived through the transition of our currency from drachmas to euros. Changing a numerical system of a country has its difficulties but it's far from impossible and it didn't take too long for everyone to adjust. Saying "it's too late" for the US is silly.

Excellent video! I am an American but I lived in France and fell in love all of it, including French and the metric system. Alas, i had to return to the States but i gang onto metric as much as possible and I watch tv and news in French quite a bit. Vive le Systeme International! 😊🎉

As someone who enjoys cooking (and cook books from various countries), I must say the first thing I'm looking at after the cover is the units. If a cookbook is in metric, it's useful, I can buy it. If a cookbook is in imperial, it's unusable because I have litterally nothing to measure oz, cups, gallon or whatever non-sense. My kitchen is metric, it saves a LOT of time.

Americans often seem to think that other countries never had to go through the cultural shift to common metric usage, but they did. People complained, people hated it, said they'd never use metric, and now 50-70ish years on (depending on the country) it's a forgotten issue.

Great vid. I'm Canadian, and work for a large multinational US based company. I'm constantly astounded by how I have to correct simple mathematics mistakes made by the American folk I have to work with. And they're shocked when I tell them that the vast majority of large American science industry companies use metric. ugh...

Very true when it comes to cooking. Not only is a "cup" a volume, not a weight unit, but the actual size of the cup varies depending on who you ask. And you have probably driven on the German autobahns, you'll understand the need for km/hour speeds...

audio is balanced great between scenes!

The units in the metric system are all related to each other: 1 litre of water weighs 1kg, and has a volume of 10cm x 10cm x 10cm. It takes 1 calorie of energy to raise 1ml of water by 1°C

I grew up in Canada and went through the Imperial-Metric transition. A lot of complaining but people adapted. Fun little story - my mother was outraged and asked me "how am I supposed to know how much a cut of meat weighs?" I asked here what weight of, say, a steak, she usually bought in pounds. Got a dirty look for that one because she never bought by weight to begin with. She just eye-balled the size of the cut needed to feed the family - nothing changed there.

In germany we use EL and TL for cooking. EL = soup spoon TL = tea spoon for distance we also use football (soccer) fields. and when driving you always should have 4 car length space to the front vehicle... haha

The cup system was useful when people couldn't afford measuring equipment. As it was all ratio based, it didn't matter what sized cup you had.

For me, there’s nothing more frustrating than having to do a calculation in American engineering units, especially because they don’t have a unit of force. It’s lbs mass, and lbs force, which makes reading things way more complicated and you have to use a correction factor.

The advantage of the metric system is that it is decimal. 1000 grams is one kilogram. 1000 meters is 1 kilometer. It's easy to recalculate. Our thinking works on a decimal basis. Our digits are decimal. One mile is 1760 yards or 5280 feet. 3 feet is 1 yard. 1 Foot is 12 inches. How do you want to recalculate this? The only measurements where we do not calculate in the decimal system are time and angles. 60 seconds is 1 minute. 60 minutes is 1 hour. 24 hours is one day. 365 (or 366) days are one year. - And how complicated it is when you have to recalculate it.

Canadian here, we use both, F for cooking, C for temp, and working construction it’s useful to use both, we’re odd

Actually you're mostly water...

As a French living for a while in the US I was surprised by the number of printed material that are metric. In LA the leaflet about earthquakes measures people should take was entirely in metric with no translation at all. It's the same with many government documents, scientific literature, etc. In automotive mechanics engine displacement is now measured in liters, bolts and nuts sizes in millimeters, etc. Metric seems to slowly invade the US.

The great thing about baking in metric is you can "weigh volume" cause water has a density of ~1 g/ml (0.981): I very seldomly use a measuring cup and just convert ml of water into grams 1:1 and use the same scale I have already set up for the dry ingredients. The same for milk, It's not 100% precise but close enough.

This is really interesting as it points out the two biggest issues with any system conversion: intuition and practicality. I honestly don't hate imperial for distance when it comes to approximation. But for calculations a base 10 system is just faster when it comes to unit conversion over multiple units. I love inches though as I have two lines on my index finger that is pretty much exactly one inch.. Plus we still use that for a lot of things in Europe, like lumber and tubing. Not always, but often. As I machine some stuff I regularly switch between thou and mm though and neither of them are that great, millimeters are too big, microns are often way to small to deal with, and thousands of an inch just isn't intuitive if you weren't raised using it. When it comes to volume metric is also pretty interesting for approximation. A cube with 10 centimeter sides will be about 1 liter of water and weigh one kilogram. As everything is base 10 it's very intuitive that a cube that is 1x1x1 meter will hold about 1000 liters of water and weigh 1000 kilograms, 1 metric ton and so forth. (yes yes I know, this is not EXACT, but it is good starting point for learning to correlate volume, weight and dimensions)

Definitely agree with the butter part in cooking

Kilometers are super intuitive to me when driving. 120kmh is the standard speed limit in most European highways, meaning in a minute you drive 2km. So when I see a sign that says a town is 60km away, I instinctively know I'll take about half an hour to get there

My dad was saying that when they did the metric conversion in Australia all the hardware stores were giving away free metric rulers to help with the change

The weather in the UK is very easy to describe. Its cold or it's unusually warm will cover most situations.

As a norwegian i can easily visualize a couple hundred meters or kilometers as i've seen those distances ALL the time. 2km was about the distance from my house to the school, neat. the local store is 200m away, no biggie. However i do on occasion think "oh it's just 4 swimming pools away" as i swam for 7 years.. so the football field makes sense in that regard, but i am amazed that it's a *very* american thing that nearly all y'all understand. like SO many of you watch or did football so it's a common thing to say (many would look at me puzzled if i said "oh yeah it's just 3 swimming pools away")

The mental gymnastics required to believe imperial measurements are the best to use is astounding.

If you were alive in Canada in the early 70s, you went through the conversion from imperial to metric. The most obvious, visual queue was all the signs on the highways went to metric. There are no more miles on highway signs. The minute we bought a newish car, we appreciated the convenrgence between the speedometer and the highway speed limit. Gradually, everything fell into place.

Neither unit is confusing nor is converting one from the other. Yet ppl are sooo proud of whichever one they use lol

"I am not water" he said while being 60% water 😂

Another important thing about the metric system is that EVERY measurement can be converted into each other or is used in the measurement of each individual thing.

(For context, I was raised learning the imperial system) As someone who does a lot of sewing using European patterns and instructions, I have to use the metric system all the time. When I initially started using the metric system in sewing, I was always doing the math in my head converting centimeters to inches and inches to centimeters, using the foundation if what I new in imperial (inches, feet, yards, etc) as a reference for the metric system measurements I wasn't as used to yet. This made the whole process very stressful. But at some point I stopped trying to equate the metric measurements to imperial measurements and started allowing myself to make new associations to the metric measurements. When I stopped doing the math between the two, and just let them exist independently it became a lot easier to understand and visualize the metric measurements without having to equate them to their imperial equivalent. The irony about John's video is he's a language guy. And a thing with language is to be fluent and speak comfortably you have to reach a point where you stop translating every single word in your head.

In Brazil we use Futebol fields as well, although it's a different type of field(Soccer).

There was actually a TED talk about the how language and culture affects the biology of brains towards our sense of direction, measure, time, and temperature. As there is one group of people uses the directions of compass than the general up, down, left, and right which allowed them to be very aware of they are and where north is. This is also a reason why some people say how long will it take to get to a place rather than how far in distance a place is.

Just a note: Americans don't use Imperial, they use the US System, which is based on Imperial but not identical. Imperial has a ton that's set at 2240 pounds, while the US uses 2000. Imperial has the stone set to 14 pounds, but US doesn't use it at all. The US system also has gallons as a standard, but most Imperial users won't use it.

Ireland switched the road signs/speed limits from miles to kms back about 20 years ago. I grew up thinking in miles so it was mildly confusing/annoying at first - but I did a lot of driving at the time and soon adjusted. These days thinking in miles is weird. Your point about language immersion is spot on - if you are surrounded by it, it "sticks" in the brain much faster and eventually becomes the norm. Humans are nothing if not adaptable critters.

Celsius makes a lot of sense for weather especially if you live in cold places. Here in Scandinavia for instance -5 is mild for winter. When things get below -10, that's when it's starting to get cold for real and water itself obviously relates a lot to the weather. Here's a great practical example: You know that when it flips to 0 and above, the snow will start smelting. So: If you see in the chart that it will snow in minus degrees then go above 0 at lunch and then below zero again in the evening, that means you know it will be slippery outside. So that 0 freezing point relative is fantastic.

For temperature, the example of "understanding the temperature on the range of 0 to 100" gets brought up constantly as an advantage of Fahrenheit and it's such a weirdly irrelevant basis of comparison. Having grown up with Celsius I have a decent intuition of how hot or cold the weather is on a range of something like -40 C to +40 C from experience. There's no need for 0 to 100 to be the "weather range" when a range centred on 0 at a useful observable point of reference is perfectly easy to wrap my head around.

I’m so glad to hear that someone else has a problem with using cups as measurements. When an American gives me a recipe in cups, I’m always like “what size? A small tea cup or a mug?” I get the reply that whichever size you use is the same for all ingredients so it doesn’t matter, but then what about eggs? If the recipe says two eggs, is that the same for a small cup and a mug? It just seems so nonsensical to me. I’d rather get my kitchen scales out and weigh out the precise measurements.

Well, I don't know about other European countries, but in France, we also sometimes count distances in football fields, to better grasp the meaning of a certain distance. Just... We do it with a real football field... The one in which you touch the ball with your foot more than anything else

Your dressing scale for temps is interesting, I also have one but its less than -5 full winter gear, -5 to 0 light winter gear, 0 to 5 shorts and light jacket, 5+ shorts and t-shirt.

I switched to using Celsius on my phone and I got a pretty intuitive grasp from checking the weather every day. I figure if you start using metric in a navigation app you’ll get a handle on it pretty quick. We already use liters in fluid measurement when buying things like soda.

Thanks for this video! I’m an American living in the US and a metric advocate. I have taught myself to understand most things in the metric system. GPS, weather apps, household measurements, phone settings, and kitchen utensils .. for example .. are all in metric. Now I intuitively understand speed, distance, and other stuff in metric just because I look at it all the time. I treated metric just like learning a foreign language. I forced myself to seek out opportunities to have it around me and continued that exposure. The government and private enterprise should start pushing metric more since a lot of change in the US has to make financial sense first.

It just feels like an argument based in American exceptionalism. Like given how many other countries have made the switch where the people have adjusted to the new system it seems difficult to argue Americans wouldn't be the same once they are actually immersed in it.

I'm very glad to have been born in a metric country that doesn't have any of the weird units the UK has. Not only that but everything in metric just makes sense to me. I'm exactly 2 m tall, from the tip of my middle finger to the edge of my elbow it's exactly 50cm, 1 km is what I could walk in 10 minutes. All of it, so neat!

Playing video games helps a lot with the ability to adapt to different systems intuitively and quickly. Each game always has their own unique and seemingly arbitrary measurement system, whether it be currency, weight, time, etc, even those loosely based around IRL counterparts.

Here in Ireland, the roads changed from miles to kilometers the year I learned to drive. Great fun having signs in one system, the speedometer in the other and the instructor swapping back and forth whenever he remembered the change. The country survived the switch at any rate.

As someone who grew in EU/Metric and had to move and swiftly adapt to using Imperial, well, all I can say is that the only way to do it is to "let go" and start using it for what it is...sense of "what 20ft means" will come with time, just like it did with the "natives" : my 5yo has zero idea what 20ft means, or at least no better idea than what 20m would be. And unless you are using imperial for some linear rhythm where fractions of 12 give you flexibility that is a tad better than 10's (architect in my case), I have to say imperial is stupid...weight? a joke...fluids? ludicrus...scales? needlessly complicated... Metric is simpler, better supported, easier to convert up and down and around. The language example is great: learning metric "from a book" is the same as learning a language from a book that you never speak.

For those still using feet and Yards. A 6" man has a walking stride of =/- 1 yard, a man of 2m has a walking stride of 1m. 1m= 39", or 3'3", or 1yard 3". So a km is =/- 100 strides of a man at a brisk walk. 8km = 5miles. Yes I had to learn both systems as I was born before South Africa converted to the metric system. Thank you for clearing up why a US Gal is smaller that an Imperial Gal. For those who fly regularly, aircraft fuel is measured in L but converted to kg.

When I was living I the US for a bit i initially converted temp, distance and speed to metric but very quickly just got my references set. 85 degrees was warm and comfortable, driving 70 is the speed limit on the highway, 300 miles takes about 5 hours etc etc. It was not very hard. What for me was cooking recepies. It seriously the issue is within engineering,planning and manufacturing, a common unit system for that should simplify a lot.

As someone who works in science and engineer, metric is the gold standard. Nothing is more frustrating to me than figuring out 1/4" bolt made with the imperial system won't fit a 6mm metric thread and that someone once again mixed the two up. I would say, stuff that I do day-to-day would be nightmare if we were all stuck in imperial. I recall NASA screwed up a Mars mission because engineers were using imperial units and the mission operators were using metric without the proper conversion. I'm the same boat as Evan, I've switched all of cooking to metric. In fact, if something calls out cups or ounces of dried goods, I'll look up densities of the goods in question and covert over to metric grams for that added precision (yeah, it comes with the science job). As for driving distance, I've only driven once in Germany so adjusting car speed and distance was still a challenge. I'm constantly converting between km and mi. I'm slowly converting my running distance to metric km. It helps that lots of workout apps will default to metric. Agreed, end of the day, it's all about exposure.

I'm on a lot of baking groups, many of which are in the US, and a lot of US cooks have realised that cups aren't accurate enough (1 cup of flour can be massively out depending on the type of flour) and have entirely switched to grams.

Having moved from the United States to Canada, I pretty much agree with your premise. English-speaking Canada uses the metric system for most things except cooking, which I assume is because we import a lot of American cookbooks. We even still use Fahrenheit, but exclusively for baking. So I've adjusted pretty well to everything except weight.

In snowy places, celcius represents weather really well! Above zero will experience melt, and below zero will experience freezes. Also, increments of 10 degrees celcius are really good milestones for what type of clothes is appropriate for the weather.

I am an American with an engineering degree. US versions of textbooks contained problems in both US units and metric units and I think I spent more time trying to understand the different units than the actual problem. Amusingly, some students would save money by getting inexpensive international edition books; they had the same content but omitted the US unit parts.

You know, that unit confusion thing is precisely the reason for metric. There were just so many different measurement systems before metric, and they all used the same words to mean different things. There were Nuremberg bushels and Leipzig bushels (those cities are two hours' drive apart). There were different bushels for wheat and barley. There were different feet everywhere. When the first railroad was built in Germany, the workers built it to the wrong gauge at first, because the spec sheet said 4ft 8 1/2 in, and they thought Bavarian feet, not British ones.

As a Norwegian I have no issues with the British pint. It's such a charming term. A pint of milk. I like it. The rest, just confuse me. Not because I can't learn or understand it, but because it's just so difficult to convert within their own system, like say convert feet to inches, etc. It seems so outdated, it's like how sailors would measure things in old books written centuries ago. It's about as senseless as the Danish language. Danish children use on average six months longer to learn to speak than Norwegian and Swedish children, because the Danes just decided to talk like they do. And then, they had a go at the number system too! And just like Danish children trying to speak, I worry that American children will have a harder time learning measurements than normal children, because it's so unnecessarily complicated. The imperial system is just like the Danish language. Some things just doesn't make sense and should be left to the past.

Both work fine. There are pros and cons to both but I think we can safely say that we have produced many marvels using both systems and so both work great when you understand them. In canada we have officially gone metric since the 1970s but in our day to day life, we still use both. For example, we will use celcius for temperature when talking about weather but we still use Fahrenheit for cooking temperatures. Well use metric for driving distances, but imperial when measuring shorter distances like a the living area of a house. It probably seems weird for outsiders but we understand each other which in the end is what really counts.

As an American engineer, I love the metric system. Calculations (and even estimations) are so much easier in every way I can think of. I sometimes have to deal with imperial (we make carbon fiber fabrics) and hate when I have to convert specifications or measurements between standards, depending on the customer.

German here! I love love cooking and baking and I always try out new stuff. One thing I noticed is that professional chefs are all using metric measurements without even questioning. You are right, sometimes eyeballing is okay, but especially baking requires the exact amounts.

Evan teases me with those spon spot sequays more times than my ex

7:25 absolutely love that part

For 330ml cans, I always thought they made it as a 1/3 of a liter rounded. We also get 250ml and 500ml cans though. Ounces are just weird to me as they are used to meassure volume and weight but when you measure weight of a gold, you will mostly see Troy ounces. I just measure my gold in kg lol.

I feel like celsius makes the most sense for temperatures when it comes to countries like Canada. I’ve experienced the range of -40C to 40C. So there is enough variation to make it meaningful. Knowing if it’s colder or warmer than freezing can be useful for predicting ice and snow

I think its the same with learning a different language. Yeah, you can speak language by always switching the foreign language to your native language, but you truly master it, if you dont need to.

The Celsius range is also advantageous in chemistry as it's more compatible with it and the conversion to Kelvin is trivial.

We changed to the metric system here in Australia right when it was arguably the most difficult for me - when I was in school. We were taught how to add pounds, shillings and pence, then decimal currency was introduced so we had to start all over again and learn dollars and cents. After learning about inches and feet, we changed to centimetres and metres. After learning Fahrenheit, we had to convert to Celsius. Now, five decades later (that makes me feel old), my brain is 100% metric. If you tell me a temperature in Fahrenheit, I have to convert it to Celsius to get a feel for it. I have to convert speeds to kilometres per hour to get the feel of how fast it is. If I see a distance in miles, I have to multiply it by 1.6 to convert to kilometres in order to relate to it. Of course, it didn't take five decades to get to this point. It happened surprisingly fast. For some time, I was equally comfortable with both systems but over time, the old, more complex one just fades away. Having lived a large chunk of my life with both systems, would I ever go back? Hell, no! Was it worth the short term pain of making the switch? Absolutely.

Part of me feels like the US has a better chance of switching to a completely non scientific method of measurement like “that’s about 3 car lengths,” “it’s hot enough to make scrambled eggs on the sidewalk” or “just add a dash of salt to really add flavor,” than switching to another scientific measurement system. We barely even understand our own right now

the weather one makes sense, but i think i would still prefer the convenience of 0 degrees and below meaning frozen roads and snow

As an engineer that occasionally needs to swap back and forth between systems I now have a fairly intuitive sense for either one AND I can see the pros and cons of each. Imperial, in general, is a bit superior in divisibility having factors for a foot, or 12 inches, including 2, 3, 4, and 6... whereas metric and base ten only has 2 & 5 to get whole numbers with no "partials". I also point out that it is far easier and intuitive to split things into halves repeatedly with relative precision. All that being said, when dealing within metric having the different units of length and volume and such interlinked, makes it easier to calculate one into the other smoothly. Like I said, pros and cons depending on what you are doing AND the level of precision available.. If one does not have the precision instrumentation to insure that accuracy, metric starts to fall apart, whereas I can choose any given "standard" I find and apply it to everything and maintain 'internal' accuracy for something I want to do... Metric is entirely dependent on an almost molecular (if not atomic) level of measurement to stay consistent... I don't know about you, but I don't happen to have the microscopes and other high tech devices to measure that fine of a detail. Is it necessary in todays world? YES! Especially when people in different parts of the world need the stuff they make to fit what someone else makes... but if everything were to collapse and fail spectacularly (not that unlikely anymore) things like maintaining the accuracy of metric would be rather difficult. I agree that total immersion will DEFINITELY focus a person onto a given measurement style and I also know that despite the "freedom units" hype, America is solidly based on the precision of metric which is then converted to those "freedom units" to keep people happy... those the strangeness of 2 liter bottles for most soft drinks as opposed to the gallon/half gallon and quart for some liquids, and the use of ounces for many others. I do not necessarily agree with your viewpoint on temperature however... it *can* make a certain sense from either set of parameters but Celsius reduces it into fractionals or decimal differences that are generally quite a bit looser and more imprecise than Fahrenheit, and if you are going to use the "precision" argument then why not go to the most precise variant which is Kelvin?!? Overall, it gets down to personal choice and required precision for transferring ideas so each person can build or create the same thing. I can admire certain aspects of pure metric as well as Imperial... working with both all the time makes me a sort of "bilingual" engineer in a way and the almost automatic conversions I do in my head doesn't bother me as much as it does for others... what **does** bother me is the smug "superiority" that gets tossed about... Also, about your cooking comparison, there are differences in density at the molecular level as well as packing... I might STILL have to "pack" that brown sugar to get the same relative volume or I have to change it to weight and then you are talking the differences between the density of water and the material you are using as well as how well it can fill a given area... Everything is going to involve multiple variables that can impact other areas of measurement and tables SUCK! It can also be easier to break down a recipe into smaller units like half, third, quarter and so on using Imperial.

An experiment in a metal shop one of the employees put up a hidden camera to show the problem of using the imperial system. When dividing a certain measure, five mechanics gave five different answers, and when taking doubts with a calculator they saw five wrong answers.

The UK slipped quietly over to metric during my lifetime. Schools switched to only teaching metric from the early 70s. At about the time that the UK stopped consuming mostly UK produced products, as markets went global. I still remember how my brain fried trying to learn Imperial Measurements. Units like peck and perch, chains and furlongs. Stones, hundredweights and tons. I still remember chanting "Two pints, one quart, four quarts one gallon", but wtf is a flued ounce? Well it's apparently 1/16 of a US pint, but 1/20 of an Imperial Pint.

I like your comparison of learning metric to learning a new language. I grew up in Canada in the 60s, and in about grade 5 my school was introduced to the metric system. When I travel to the States, I am reminded of the process. Any new road sign with metric also had a hole from a shotgun and anti -metric graffiti. Every measurement in temperature, and distance and weight, had a quick hack for translation. For example, double it and add 30, or multiply by 2.2 After a few years of being forced into this system the younger generation didn't need to translate anymore, although most of the older generation hated metric until the day they died. Now Canada is mostly metric but because our big cousin (USA) lives next door and we get things like building materials etc. from them, which are in imperial, so we never really fully transferred over. I have been in construction for 35 years, and all of our commercial construction is in metric, but most of our residential construction is in imperial.

As a Brazilian living in the UK, I still use Km for driving distances on my satnav, but I got used to Miles per hour as speedy, as it's easily available in the speed signs.

My wife and I were just baking some dessert bars earlier today. (We are Americans living in the US.) We were told to use 2/3 of a cup of butter. We eventually Googled how much that is in grams and weighed it out. It was so much easier that way!

American here and I was raised using the metric system mainly because my dad is an engineer and a lot of the measurements in his line of work revolve around the metric system. The system proves to be very useful when we're out of States travelling to other countries (the rest of the world, lol) I sure do hope that our gov switches to using metric bc it makes so much sense.

I took my temperature very often because my allergic rhinitis made me prone to catching a cold. The number 36.5°C (looked it up, that’s 97.7°F) is ingrained into my mind as my normal body temperature.

12:24 don't worry, we Europeans also use footballfields as meassurement.... but it's the proper football

As someone from the UK who was born when the metric system came in, I was taught both, and use both. Most of Britain do even the younger generations. I remember the days when Winter temperatures were in Metric but summer was in imperial

It's the same as language, you can learn language, but you really have immerse yourself in the language to start thinking in the language. It isn't impossible, it isn't even difficult, it just takes consistency and a little bit of time.

Totally agree on the kitchen point I'm in Australia and only really own measuring cups and spoons for when following American measurements (and honestly half the time I just convert and use my scales) and honestly the European recipes using metric ALWAYS turn out better

I'd just been taught about measurements in school in Australia when the teacher came in and said "this is a metre" and metric conversion happened. A few years of dual road speed and distance signs, but we pretty well just changed.