We Get Angry over Measuring Units 

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quantum gravity is trivial in front of imperial measurements, as a fellow physicist

I would like this comment but it's got 420

At first I thought about halloween tradition 😂 but It can be scary

so, daily basis

same annoyance in India/Pakistan with this extra unit called "Tola" specifically for Gold and weighs about 11 grams

I have never thought about that. That is indeed a very stupid unit. Lol Thanks for sharing.

how about this a carat is a measurement of weight for gems, but purity for metals

Reusing unit names is bad enough, but reusing the name and the characteristic that's being measured for a different unit? That's on an extra special level of stupid.

Wait till you learn about long scale counting and short scale; short form being a bit more common.

I would say something here but I already know where this debate will go. However I will measure my window in inches for my new air conditioner simply to infuriate non-Americans on the internet

@@atomheart7907 By all means you do you. If you live in the US, go ahead and use imperial system; but, once you're outside, don't expect people to conform to your system. Easy. Edit: fixed grammar and punctuation.

@@Gabriel-l agreed. But i think that wont be a problem for most americans, as ive heard that most of them dont ever leave the country

The sad thing is America DID try to update. One of the presidents decided to update to metric but then nearly immediately reverted that decision upon encountering a km/h road sign and not understanding it.

@@mono8476 I don’t know where you heard this, but you’re wrong😂😂 about 70% of Americans travel internationally. We just don’t have to travel outside of the country to experience new places, we just need to travel to the other side of the country (or state) but just because we don’t need to, doesn’t mean we don’t.

Which is also why we should use volumetric measurements when it comes to culinary related things. A pinch of salt. Just how big of a pinch is that? How many fingers did you use? Is it kosher or fine table salt? An egg. How small is the egg?

exact accuracy is usually not too big of an issue for cooking. a pinch of salt has room for variance just depending on how salty you prefer your food, a slightly larger egg wont really affect your final dish. the main issue is with baking, where exact measures are much more important for science and chemistry reasons, which is why most bakers recommend weighing things out

@@xuapril32 I agree, I was mostly irritated at american baking recipes that call for a stick of butter, but honestly the discrepancy between what a "tablespoon" is exactly is a lot more annoying, again mostly in baking. Probably that's more a problem for me personally as an aussie, for some reason our tablespoon is 33% bigger than everywhere else.

In that way I vastly prefer recipies that just give up and just go x units. 2 units of this .1 units of that 220 units of whatever. What is that unit? You decide based on how much you want the results to be.

@@Whitewingdevil 1 stick of butter in America is always the same which is 1/4lb or like 110g For me the confusing part was “1 cup” also it’s annoying having to have all this kitchen measuring utensils when I can just have a scale

Using a micrometer measured in inches would be hell

Standard what? For most of the world, metric is standard.

@@ravenwraith1017 in the US, standard is imperial. But most people I know use metric tools.

@@juanmanuelpenaloza9264 So the international standard instead of imperial? Gotchu! You do make perfect sense going from 8mm to 10mm, though ;-)

I remember watching a video of a guy trying to justify imperial, and the reason he gave was that imperial measurement tables cannot be smoothly transitioned to metric, which is hilarious (basically, saying something like 3foot doesn't give a whole metric value, instead having a long string of ugly decimals)

Then you ask yourself what the heck is PST and EST

War times

@@DanielPereira-ey9nt Yeah that's a major annoyance as well. Especially when international companies announce stuff and they write PST and EST but not UTC. Americans probably know the difference between their own time zones but everyone else has to look it up. Just write it in UTC time and everyone can remember how much they're going to have to add to that.

Just use UTC. UTC was created separate from what we previously had a GMT to remove any confusing. Then you see online you see PST, PDT, EST. How the heck am I supposed to know that if I'm not from that country being America.

@@susear5939 it's UTC

To me stones as a meassurment sounds Just as archaic as feet.

Soo...England.

I feel dor you comrade

I am an engineer in america and i pretty much exclusively used metric units in college

#5 the progression may be janked but it's easier, at least to me.

@@pennyinheaven it cant be easier than a progression of units of 10 surely? You only need to remember one number, and if you forget the clues in the name, "kilo" is derived from "thousand" in greek, so "kilogram" just means "one thousand grams".

@@__-fm5qv Cooking measurements have tools. It's helpful when doing small batch cooking because you don't need a scale. But large, industrial cooking, weights more make sense.

@@pennyinheaven There are also volume measurement tools for metric units.

@@zuruumi9849 Not usual. And small cookery aren't by tens. 1 tsp is 5ml, 1 tbsp is 15ml. If you don't have tools, one can ball park using utensils for eating or drinking. Again, metric makes more sense for industrial scale cookery.

why are we americans so dependant on farmers first daylight savings time and now THIS bullshit

@@BrianPalmore i mean they are the reason we have food on the table

@@BrianPalmore because before the industrial revolution most of the economy revolved around agriculture.

@@BrianPalmore What country isn't dependent on farmers? If a countries land isn't really suitable for certain vegetable or fruit then they get it from other countries that have those.

@@BrianPalmore Sorry this is so late and you'vr probably forgotten, but almost every country and civilization in history has been dependant on farmers. Even in ancient times, there was a reason they built near fertile land and rivers/bodies of water.

We literally lost a space probe for shit like that.

@@francesco8000 hahaha lol

As a chemical engineering student life would be much easier without it, but no we were told to learn about it so that in the slightest chance we work with Americans or Brits we can utilize it. The time I take converting those units could've been used to understand the problem more.

Pound and Pound Force is such a stupid idea because most people will ignore the second word and be confused when they randomly switch from talking about force to talking about weight

@@francesco8000 wait, what?

YYMMDD is bis ye

MMDDYY GANG RISE UP.

With the exception of "4th of July" most people who give a date in the US do say the month first. Example: "when is the wedding?" "Its December 7th." I dont know of anyone who would say "7th of December." I'm curious if that way of talking is more common in the UK or other countries.

@@nicksmith9109 In polish you would start with a day generally.

or use the date that everyone else uses for once ddmmyy

It's insanity, so I just do like Connor and stubbornly use metric until some starts asking me to convert.

Buildings, People, and Cooking Imperial Everything else Metric That said when referencing speed I use MPH and Km/h depending on the subject

Fun fact about Canada, we are the only developed country that uses all three date systems in official documentations (YY/MM/DD, MM/DD/YY, and DD/MM/YY, though the last one is the most popular one).

@@MySingerlover documents must be a nightmare

@@warcrimes390 It is. I don't know about other countries, but they almost always specify which date system to use to avoid confusion. If no specification (rare), we use DD/MM/YY and pray that it's the right one. Aside from government documents, most documents allowed me to just use name date instead (ie. Nov 29, 2021).

Why would you even use ounces instead of teaspoons and tablespoons anyways?

Annoying at shit when you look up a recipe, you look at it and it says like 10,000 Johnny Bravo of salt.

@@mech-x-xavious Because the volume of something like flour fluctuates based on temp, humidity, etc. Measuring by weight is actually consistent (according to my baking enthusiast friend).

@@AllUpOns Fair enough

@@mech-x-xavious I think both have certain advantage. Small amount of ingredient measured using teaspoon and tablespoon could be better because smaller amount, closer to the smallest unit of measurement of the scale, means larger error. Most kitchen scales don't go below 1g so anything close to that has huge error. Also, spoons are sometime faster than using a scale. When it comes to cup, however, I think that system needs to be throw out, converts to grams/ounces. Cup is wildly inaccurate and sometime inconvenient. It's frustrating when recipes ask for cups of butter, expecting butter to be compressed into the measuring cups.

you seem to forgot nasa blew up over a hundread million dollars because of this, and they would save more money long term.

@@thatundeadlegacy2985 I did not "forget" this. Nothing in my post suggested I didn't know this.

yeah i have the same thing in my course. Just over the last two years they've actually dropped the Metric questions because the teachers just went "Well, so long as you don't go international you will never use them." and so the entire thing got phased out for straight imperial, which i had no issue with.

You can’t even agree on the name of your system. I’ve already seen it being called Imperial, Standard, and USC.

@@ybenax What a weak take. This is like being upset that it's referred to as "SI" and "Metric".

That's actually very efficient and neat In Italy the last part you explained We simply freely and randomly switch between 29-11-21 or 29/11/21 But your system of keeping it diverse with - only for year and / only in-between day and month That's so much better

And as an American and talking with other Americans, I believe in our typical speech patterns we say the month first. I imagine we say 4th of July to differentiate that day.

@@vidcas1711 I've heard a lot of people from the US say things like January 1st, which would then explain why that format is more common.

by "TON" , do you mean short, long, US or UK ton?

A ton of Americans is actually around 10 Americans cuz of weight stereotypes

@@user-bs4qu7tb2g metric ton. (Yes, that's a thing... 1000kg)

For normal dates, I think most Americans say the month first, such as August 2nd, January 11th, Etc, and I think we say Fourth of July as a way to emphasize that this day is our Independence Day.

@@user-bs4qu7tb2g "Ton" as an idiom. So it just means a lot. Interestingly this is where we got the idea that Noah's flood lasted 40 days and 40 nights. Because that was a common idiom at the time that ment a long time.

It's easy to forget because the entire rest of the world mocks Americans as well

Na but day month yr is way easier than month day year

@@sanjaynambisan2538 Without a doubt.

@@sanjaynambisan2538 it's almost as if counting from bottom to top and left to right was logical...

To be fair, most Americans forget that other countries even exist.

Well all the websites that matter on the internet are American made. Internet usage in America is the best in the world. There is great coverage here

@@TheVoltaire1 Define best internet usage.

Americans do tend to be the largest country group on a lot of English speaking sites (that aren't specific to other countries). Especially social media sites that were founded in the US (RU-vid, Facebook, Twitter, etc) But yes, complaining about an Australian site is completely ridiculous.

then I gave up in cm and started measuring in feet pics

It's 1/128th of a gallon.

I'm from the US and when I moved to Japan I had a conversion chart ON HAND. It's very useful, I had similar problems with comprehending groceries for cooking/recipes and height, weight, distance ect. You should think of getting one. Saves a lot of trouble and confusion when talking to people also

I love how everyone in the comments is claiming they don't have a smart phone that can do conversions. Apparently there isn't a single European alive who owns an iPhone or Android device. Every single person in Europe is using a Nokia from 1996, I guess. Sounds very believable.

@@xinceras-6542 well id rather have anything else than an iphone

@@xinceras-6542 i forgot the only continent besides NA is Europe

That just sounds like a good way for someone to mess up

The day is more important than the month in the 4th of July's case

The day is more important than the month in the 4th of July's case

The day is more important than the month in the 4th of July's case

The day is more important than the month in the 4th of July's case

@@zaedis5629 Then transitively the 4th of December should also be the case. If it being the 4th is more important, being July or December shouldn't change the order unless July is just an unusually unimportant month.

using psi does make sense even in europe. (using psi for pressure makes a shit ton more sense than using atmospheres) 1 psi its around 7kpa and 1 atm its 101kpa its more usefull to just use the smaller unit since the normal one aint sequential either

​@kuma8030 but then cant people just use Pa?

A foot is about 30 cm so 10 cm is a third of a foot or about 4 inches

Feel our pain when we have to convert from imperial :D. Like, feet is kind of intuitive, but whose feet is it? My feet are pretty huge, but then my sister's is like half of that and I used to have pretty tiny feet a few decades ago. Btw. my country used to use forearms for measurement before going metric (a long time ago), but I firmly stand by that being a superior unit to feet as you can measure things like cloth without taking off shoes. And yes, it was relative to the one measuring.

@@zuruumi9849 They're not literally feet, they're just called that for some reason. It's 1/3 of a meter!

@@arch3223, holy shit you got giant feet.

All that conversion must be a pain. You'd be better off ditching Imperial and fully adopting metric.

Yeah, as a Chinese Canadian, my family purely used the metric system while everyone else used a weird mixture of the metric system and the imperial system. I did not know my height in feet and inches until a couple months ago and I no longer know what my weight is in pounds (despite the norm for Canadians is to measure both in the imperial system) so whenever a doctor asks me for info, they have to check my weight and height themselves and my friends just gave up whenever I told them my height. Everything else works just fine though because everything else just uses the metric system (unless you’re furnishing your home and stuff like that but even then, both the metric system and the imperial system are used on labels).

That and for the extraneous "U's", the brits ADDED those to words and the newspaper companies in saving money, restored english back to its more proper spelling.

I think that you are mostly right but i think that people complain about the imperial system because is totally unintuitive, maybe because the imperial system feels like isn't much of a system and more like a bunch of almost unrelated units grouped together. Meanwhile in the metric system everything seems more natural, because it was made to be that way.

@@DarkHunter047 that’s cause they literally are, that’s why many conversions (like a mile being 5280 ft) are such weird numbers they were originally taken from different measurement systems

​@@DarkHunter047 america uses the imperial system because it is more intuitive. compared to the metric, which is incredibly useful for calculations since everything is divisible by 10, the imperial system is relative to how humans perceive the world. for example, there's 12 inches in a foot, and 12 is divisible by 2, 3, and 4. that makes mental calculations incredibly easy for the regular person. our cooking measurements are the same because it makes it easier to split recipes in half, thirds, and quarters. as for fahrenheit, it's relative to how we would feel temperature, 100 degrees sounds like it's going to be hot because it's hot for us. it's the same for pounds, 100 pounds is heavy for us (of course, this also depends on your athletic ability as well, but my point still stands). america tried to convert over to the metric system, but it wasn't intuitive enough for regular, everyday people to use. the only i don't understand is miles.

Uhm... 1/4 is bigger than 3/32. Unless this is a joke I'm not getting.

@@brian0057 "if" it's bigger, not "that" it's bigger, also not exactly knowing it but having to figure it out is the exact point of the comment

@@nootics I get that. I grew up with metric. But 1/4 is dramatically bigger than 3/32. In fact, it's almost three times as big. It would've made more sense to use 1/4 and 5/16 since they're much closer (1/4 = 0.25 and 5/16 = 0.31).

I don’t feel like this is a measurement system problem. Those are just fractions.

@@Zodiackiller211 why?

PHILIPPINES USES FEET?

@@chez14 only in height though. we mostly use metric

I have the same dilemma Lol How tall are you? 6’0 What is your weight: 138kgs Lfmao

The clock is not a big issue because there still the same, you know 14:00 means 2 and so on. The problem with imperial is the lack of consistency, how in one thing is measure by 12 and then by 16? I don´t even know, I use Metric.

You don't have much of a problem in the clock system. Actually that makes it more convenient. If someone told you 7:00 you would know immediately it is morning. Japan also does those weird 26:00 which meant 2am in the next day. I forgot how that works but it actually makes sense.

Precision units vs 'Freedom units'

Feet is one of the few imperial units I can handle because it's almost exactly 0,3m

My grandpa is a retired pilot and it always confused me when he speaks about hight in feet. In our country we only use metric but for some bizarre reason feet are used to measure how high a plane is flying. It's like how the thickness of wood planks is always measured in inches despite the fact that every other thing in carpentry is measured in centimeters.

Thrown in knots (nautical miles per hour, yeah those are a thing) for airspeed and whether if it's indicated or true airspeed, which is also a function of altitude above ground in feet. Can't believe pilots do these calculations in their heads.

Isn’t that from one of Lieven Scheire’s shows? Whoaaaa-

@@axelprino copied from quora - "In aviation, why is altitude always measured in feet? “Legacy” is your answer in reality. But pilots are a bit like fisherman, which makes it fun actually (the retired guys all hanging out in a hanger telling tall tales of that “worst crosswind landing in Petoski, Michigan in ‘78, I tell you I was crabbing SIDEWAYS…” So I’ve heard so funny ones about this very subject. But theirs are far more exciting than reality. So the simple truth is, because of the proliferation of American and British aircraft during the early years of aviation, and the explosion in aviation in the United States after World War II, the imperial foot became the international standard for altitude measurement. China (PRC), North Korea, and, until 2017, Russia (they’ve completed the transition to feet I have read; I haven’t actually been there and witnessed it, my firm has a private jet, and in 2013, they were metric still), however, use meters for altitude measurement. The altimeters in my firm’s Gulfstream G650ER are all calibrated in feet, but the already highly-advanced Gulfstream Plainview™️ II avionics in our jet have been upgraded to the best possible software. So for my pilots when we are flying into pain in the ass holdout China, they tap a few times on a touchscreen and the all glass cockpit (aviation term for the former analog gauges have been replaced but multiple LCD flatscreen monitors, hence easy to tap a touchscreen and your now seeing everything in meters. For most aircraft still flying with analog gauges, when flying into metric airspace, we use a simple conversion card on a clipboard. When Shanghai Control clears us to descend to 3600 meters, we check the card and descend to the equivalent: 11,800 feet. And yes, I went up front on a colleagues older jet to watch the process in action - yikes. I’m an experienced private pilot (I got my private pilots license on my 17th birthday, it’s a passion!), certified on my Piper Cheyenne 400 LS twin turboprop to fly solo (as far as private aircraft she’s big, seats nine plus two up front, mine is configured for 6 with some luxuries, and it is still the fastest production twin turboprop to ever roll off an assembly line). And I fly out of Teterboro Airport, 11 miles from Manhattan, so I take off and land in some of the busiest airspace on earth. Add in millions in retrofits and upgrades, and she is not the simplest aircraft to fly, to say the least. My point is that I understand quite well what’s going on up front while I watched that descent and approach. During rush hour at airports like Shanghai and Beijing, the controllers rattle off clearances very fast. They will often assign my crew a heading, speed and metric altitude all in one shot. Well, in the jet with the analog gauges, the metric altitude conversion adds an additional task to an already challenging environment. I will say those guys were great - never said a word but never broke a sweat. You stay on our toes in metric airspace! i apologize for the rather verbose too complete answer, but obviously flying is a passion and I love discussing it and imparting some info when I can. So it’s an Yank/Brit legacy that almost every nation uses feet for altitude measurements, and bring your handy conversion charts for China and of course those trips to North Korea! Let me know if you have any questions. I attached a pic of our “glass cockpit” just so you can see why the avionics are not so customizable. Indeed the COOLEST thing ever to a nerd like me was when our flight computer’s “voice” began calling out our altitude in meters as well…instead of the usual “100 feet…” I got metes (my system stops saying feet of meters under 100, so when landing it’s “50….40….20….10….” - meters would be irritating at that stage."

Yeah I heard this to.

This argument makes no sense. So if a farmer sees the date, 15th November 2021, he would have difficulty seeing what month it is because it doesn't come first?

@@1Rik1 Not necessarily, but you order things by the relevance of the information. Be honest regardless of how completely logical you say you do things you still put the day of the week first? Same thing here. The month matters more so it gets a higher priority.

I'm pretty sure that only UK uses miles

I mean, for the date part, it's just written how it would be said. Usually nobody says "The twelfth of December, 2021", they say "December twelfth, 2021".

If se could have only one, that would be the best one.

cope

Just blame the British, it was their system first.

@@Notiravgsarah then changed, realising there was a better system

In my opinion, another thing I like about imperial weight and temperature is that it just seems to capture scale a little bit better. 37 Celsius just doesnt sound that crazy but 100 Fahrenheit is like, oh damn its hot outside, as an example. Or when discussing day to day human weight or gym weight it just seems a little easier to define in my head how much something weighs.

@@shps8609 I mean, food is a day to day thing and 100 degrees = boiling and 0 degrees = frozen seem like far more intuitive benchmarks to me than 0 degrees = the freezing point of a solution of brine and 100 = human body temperature. But honestly the best part of metric is that it is interchangeable around water. 1 litre is equal to one kilogram of water, which is also a cube of 10 centimetres per side. It allows you to use a scale to measure volume of most liquids, and ballpark most other things that are close enough, figure out roughly how much space you'd need for 2000 bottles of soda or 5 tons of flour or whatever. Good luck figuring out how many pounds to the gallon off the top of your head, or how much weight is in a full load of dirt in the back of a truck.

What i hate most Is that my engineering classmates dont h8 imperial as much as they should xd 🤣

I mean, you are technically correct (in some regards) but I wouldn't consider that a useful argument. I believe that there is more merit in converting to a universal standard. Simply because it drastically decreases the chances of miss understandings and errors in comunication. Like, saving hours in time cause you dont have to keep converting between systems. Or having a rocket that costs hundreds of millions of dollars exploding, or planes crashing, or satellites crashing, or cars crashing. I just think that, in the long run as the world becomes even more interconnected than it already is, the problems caused by these confusing systems will escalate. Or the programs and systems needed to automatically convert units will become ubiquitous. In the same way that using the dollar as the global standard for international trade, and how the GMT/UTC system for time made it insanely easier to coordinate between time zones. (Even if daylight savings makes it harder than neccessary for no reason whatsoever). Also metric all the way. Also I feel like within Japan, it has a lot more to do with how they still don't use computer systems to organize everything so much easier. Like, in my uni, we've used DD/MM/YYYY for over a decade now because the computers automatically organize things into years for us and directry systems make finding the physical locations of files stupid easy that even first years can do it.

Yee, what he said mate :v

Counter to that, by the logic of what changes the most frequently we should put days last. Again, with a computer if you're changing the date on a document when you update it, it's easier to click at the end of a line, delete the last number for day and type another than it is to click in between the day and month, backspace and change the day.

@@ViridianFlow How so? Who said anything about computers?

@@Wlof25 Everything we do is on computers these days so of course it's worth considering when it comes to naming things and if you're in any job that deals with any kind of record, the way to name that is YYYYMMDD_DocumentTitle_Version. To name something based on what we care about now, but then having to change it when it's something in the past is just double handling and creates more work than it we just do it right the first time.

@@ViridianFlow Nothing I said is contingent upon existence of computers, so your point is impotent.

@@Wlof25 And what you said is not the be all of the discussion, but if you're going to take such a myopic view of it and limit things to that which you understand then I suppose there's no point in talking with you.

Doing molar calculations in oz or something must be really fun...

@@_Ekaros it's pretty much never ever done. Luckily the science community realized that it would be hell and it's all pretty much standardized to be grams and moles and nothing else. However, there obviously was that famous lunar probe that failed due to American components being incorrectly constructed using imperial specs rather than metric. Probably the single most expensive fuck up of unit conversion in history. That's why today there's an even bigger emphasis on the science community all agreeing on the same rules and guidleines.

Thank god we don’t have to listen to you.

finally someone with some common sense

I mean, it kinda does ascend numerically. 12 total months, 28-31 total days, infinite years.

That and all carpentry is done in imperial. A saw blade width is exactly 1/8inch Plywood sheets are measured by the 1/8inch Wall studs are exactly 1.5"×3.5" Sheathing is always 4'×8' Because its all in fractions its very easy math to do in your head. By powers of 10 it would be downright insane.

Except the size of people varies a lot, is not the same a inch of a todler than some body builder.

@@WheresTheSauce Not really, for example a fourth of 10 would 2.5.

@@nidohime6233 Of course, but it's still useful because on average it's kind of close. Definitely not exact but useful.

Metric is constructed with fundamental constant, metric is the one founded in reality

Lol ur right, why do we still use that?

tbh i never used monitor inches to actually visualise the size of the monitor. the fact that the monitor is measured in diagonals is stupid enough.

You're telling me I'm supposed to think 30°C sounds hotter than 90°F for the weather? Fahrenheit is far superior for the weather and I'm tired of people pretending it's not!

As someone in USA myself, I also have no idea why. 😂🤦‍♂️

@@keithtestaverde3712 What lmao Metric is better for weather. 0 C is when water freezes. So anything below that you can expect ice or snow. -30 C is cold. +30 C is hot. It's way better than an arbitrary system

Because we live perfectly fine with imperial and don't need to change it

@@Ash_Wen-li Yeah but why base our scale on water? If we want a true 0 than just use Kelvin, no real chemist uses Celsius. Scientifically, Kelvin is the most accurate. Fahrenheit temperatures makes sense for weather. If it's cold its cold and if it's hot it's hot, we should use the correct scale to reflect that. 90 sounds hot and 30 sounds cold on a scale on 100, which is about the hottest it gets on Earth. What, it's too difficult to remember that 212 is boiling and 32 is freezing? Why is it important for 0 to be freezing and 100 boiling? Do you think about the stove temperature when you boil water?