This American YouTuber “can’t” use metric. Here’s why I do now
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- Опубліковано 17 тра 2024
- Johnny Harris says Americans can't switch to metric... let's see about that.
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Johnny Harris’s metric system video • Why I will NEVER use t...
0:00 Intro
1:42 Temperature
4:49 Weight
8:35 Volume
11:32 Distance & Speed
14:41 Conclusion
16:19 SPONSOR
17:37 Fun Tidbit
17:53 Ukulele Song
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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
Im dead 💀
How 2: metric
Freedom edition
Of course use something Americans are obsessed with, guns lol.
Why does freedom brain understand
Bro you just single-handedly cured the imperial systen
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.
I was thinking the same thing. Unless you're living somewhere, where the temperature never drops below 0°C, it is extremely useful to know if it's freezing outside.
Fair point. Then again, you could go live in Florida. Where freezing conditions never ever apply. (Swede speaking).
@@KennethSorling ...and being a cold weather lover, that's exactly why I'd never move to Florida! 😁
@@solaccursio There are many, many reasons never to move to Florida. I _was_ kidding before.
Same here in Finland. Also, if there is snow, but the weather suddenly rises above 0°C, you'll probably want waterproof/resistant shoes for walking in the slush (granted, you might want those shoes for regular snow, anyway).
Regarding the distance, when it comes to small, precise measurements, think carpentering, nothing beats centimeters and milimeters.
Absolutely right! Even US machinists noticed that and so the measure in "thou", which is 1/1000 of an inch (0,0254mm).
imagine 3d printing in inches lmao
Yup. Though personally I find the high degree of precision makes it less useful for personal height measurements. To me an inch (~2.5cm) is just a good degree of differentiation for human heights. 6'1" vs 6'2", sure. I'm not looking at anyone and going "Now is he 173cm or 174cm?".
@@irrevenant3bro why do you guys like unprecise stuff so much xD
its really baffeling,
using inches ia just leaving out infromation...
@@irrevenant3nobody estimates people's heights to the cm in real life. We do it in 5cm estimations (like 170, 175-ish) unless their height is really close to your own (a height that you already know). Then you just add or subtract the estimated difference.
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.
From a conversion standpoint, I think anybody who isn't crazy can agree that metric is far superior, but can we all agree that base 10 is kind of terrible? Changing to something else would be so much more difficult than just switching from imperial to metric, because it would affect basic mathematics, but 10 is a really stupid number to pick. Sure, you can halve it, but you can't divide it evenly into 3 or 4 (or halve it twice), and those are kind of important. Ignoring 1 and itself, which any number is divisible by, 10 is only divisible by two numbers: 2 and 5. 12 gives you 2, 3, 4, and 6. Twice as many, and you can halve, third and quarter it. Can you imagine if we tried to divide our day into 10 units (they originally tried to have metric days didn't they?). A 60 minute hour is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. That's kind of magical, but we did need a pretty big number to get that, and base 60 might be unwieldy. But if 12 doesn't give you enough leeway, 24 gives you 2 , 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12.
So while the imperial system is a chaotic mishmash, it is kind of handy that there are 12 inches in a foot, and if the metric system would be better at base 12... if any of us could actually handle that.
@@stuffyouotterlistento1461 The big advantage of base 10 is that conversion is a simple matter of moving the decimal point. A kilometer is a meter multiplied by 10 cubed, or 1 with three zeroes. So to get a meter from a kilometer, you simply move the decimal point three to the right and vice versa for kilometers to meter. And so on for all the other units. It's so easy a 7 year old child can learn it. No calculator is ever needed.
I'm not sure what advantages base 12 can give us that's more significant than this wonderful ease and simplicity in unit conversion
@@stuffyouotterlistento1461 I'm a Programmer. My bases are Binary Decimal and Hexadecimal.
You don't want to to anything with the other 2 in real life. Trust me you'd need a pen and paper everytime.
Base 10 is very intuitive and easy although it isn't as dividable as 12 or.
@@GlassOnion23 Oh, I doubt it'd be worth switching to a duodecimal system of weights and measures unless you were also switching to a duodecimal counting system as well. And that would be so huge, I doubt it would ever happen, so I'm mainly just griping about the shortcomings of base 10. It's pretty obnoxious not to be to able to divide things cleanly into 3 or 4 parts. A quarter foot is 3 inches; a third of a foot is 4 inches. That's nice and clean compared to a third or quarter of a centimeter.
@@Skyl3t0n Is base 10 intuitive for any reason other than it's what we're used to?
Don't get me wrong; that's a legitimate reason to keep using it, but it doesn't speak to it being inherently good, unless there's something else you mean. Base 10 _is_ manageably small, which probably works in its favor, and might be sufficient reason to prefer it over something like base 24 (for all I know), but base 12 isn't that much bigger.
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 think everyone about 180cm or above does this
For me 2 meters is about a door's tall
LoL, I think everyone use some kind of 'me units' in their mind.
Hell, I had just ordered machine shop guy to make something 'around a hand big'. And there have been plenty of an elbow long handle, an arm length rod, a full arm spand table, etc when we don't need anything precise.
2 meters is how far I can reach up 😊
I can confirm, I am 1,80 m tall, lol @@CrystalLily1302
"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.
Yes, but unless you're in the habit of being frozen or burning to death, the 100F being just slightly above normal body temperature is much more useful as that's what you're comparing against when you're estimating the temperature of things without a thermometer.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade You just have to substitute a single number here: Instead of 100, it's about 40 and you scale to that. By substituting that one number, you'd get roughly the same estimations out of it.
Also, it's kinda important to know wether it is freezing outside or not.
@@TheSorrowfulAngelAlso as Evan said it's important in north countries. You can see when temperature below zero and water become ice It's especially important in agriculture.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeAir temperature doesn't have to do much with body temperature. It's just weird to use body temperature as a reference for the weather. 25 degrees Celsius air can feel pretty warm even though your body is 36-37 degrees. But jump in 25C water and you'll find it's quite cold.
I don't rlly need to know the exact temperature I boil to death lmao.
Farenheit is basically what you get when you ask someone around how hot is it from 0-100. I rlly like that. -20 to 40 doesn't rlly hit the same
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.
Precisely. If USA used metric and the rest used imperial, we would be having the opposite conversation and people would be making a case imperial is superior
You mean the correct side of the road. Just because everyone does something one doesn't mean it's correct this goes back prior cars themselves the roman even used the left side of the road. This vustom is 1000s of years old then a bunch of idiots fucked it all up and only a few civil countries remain on the left
@@anonymouswhite352 it still doesn't do them any favours, and since when is south Africa a civil country?
@@methatis3013I dunno, metric still has the upside of being decimal, so even if it were a minority I think it’d still have a case
@@methatis3013 Not really to same degree, I think.
Imperial is traditional, allowing for that _je ne se qua_ blurring of logical thinking called feelings.
A little acknowledgement that some things does not matter, if they are not exact. Freedom?
Metric is attempting to anchor measurements in scientific bedrock. It does not vary. (is what is intended)
This does _not_ dogmatically remove any room for interpretation, but sort of focuses the image, which
does reduce the effect of some most egregious attempts of misinformation. Like Earth being flat.
(No, it's not flat.)
So comparing two photos taken in immidiate succession, one out of focus, the other in focus; it would
be of little point, arguing that the out of focus photo is a better photo of an ugly dog, when the in focus
photo shows a rather cute cat. "All hail our kitten overlords." 🙂
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.
Most of my professors just use metric for everything. We use just enough imperial to make sure we understand our fucky system for force vs mass, but that's really it.
There really is nothing more frustrating than trying to follow a recipe and finding 3 different answers for how much a cup is.
Did it matter? Didn't care if this was a large or small teaspoon. I put what I wanted in, knowing it should be "about a teaspoon" and using that to begin with but from "feel" when I knew how to cook.
@@markhackett2302 I'm autistic and it's extremely hard for me to "feel". I need exact measurements because I'm literally disabled.
@@markhackett2302You can do this for some things, but there are some things that need to be very precise. If a recipe offers the weight in grams, I usually weigh things rather than measure in cups or tablespoons or whatever.
@@markhackett2302 in cooking its about the feels, yes. but in backing you mostly need to use the precise amount for it to come out good
@@johnlastname8752I'm the exact same. I need something very specific to work with.
The only time I use imperial is in a car, because speedometers are in miles per hour, and signs often are too, much to my chagrin (what the fuck is a yard)
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.
tbh I can't survive past 28C myself.
@@RAFMnBgamingand i live at a country where the temp is almost permanently above 28c😂(
@@orangepeel1640 sounds nice
@@RAFMnBgamingme at 32°C daily 💀💀💀💀💀💀
@@RAFMnBgaming me at 45°C every day of summer 💀
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.
Great metaphor! When I was in England to learn English as a kid, I was playing with a tennis ball to see how long I can keep it in the air. It was the first time I caught myself counting in English - to myself, just because I was completely focused on the ball. Nowadays, I think as much in English as I do in my native language.
Measurements are also like language because they're really more than just a number of facts or megabytes of info - they're also a skill that you practice. And talking about practicing is almost entirely useless compared to actually practicing (and often makes it sound harder than it really is).
Understanding height is easy when you have baselines. Both in imperial and metric. Im 183, to understand the difference between 150-160, 160-170, and 170-180 was to learn how they look like compared to me.
Also, do everything in increments of 5 or 10 cm.
And learn how 1.5m look like, since most of the people you meet are higher than that.
Paradoxically, the whole world learns English to communicate with Americans, among others. How many of them bother to learn an additional language? If they had understood that it is good for the brain to be challenged, they would probably have switched to metric a long time ago (as well as learned a second language), but a brain that is not challenged does not understand such things.
2 m - 6ft
adults are usually between 160 and 200 cm
if you spread out your fingers as much as you can, the distance between the point of your thumb and pinky is roughly 10 cm
one liter of water is around one kilogram
i have no idea how difficult switching could be, i was raised using metric in everything, anyways good luck with it
@@krakenroll.2 meters is about 6 feet 7 inches. 6 feet is about 183 cms. That is a gigantic difference. 1 inch = 2,54 cms.
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 came to the comments to see if ANYONE had mentioned this! Yes, I don't think that most people understand that volume (cups) is vastly different than mass (grams). One "cup" of flour can have lots of air mixed in (like sifted) and it would have a significantly lighter mass than one "cup" of a more densely packed flour. SO much easier to weigh the ingredients out... even if you just changed the scale to ounces instead of grams. (BUT liquid ounces are not usually equal to ounces by weight.)
There are two types of pounds, no? The good old pound (lb) and the pound force (lbf). The metric equivalent is gram and Newton (kg.m/s2). So grams and pounds can both refer to mass. You find imperial intuitive in daily activities because you’re still surrounded by those units, unlike the majority of the world.
@@gerrycrisandy2425 Yes, yes, of course there are two types of pounds, as you've described (even though no one mentioned pounds in our comments,) and there are also two types of ounces (liquid ounces (oz) - a measure of volume, and the "good old" ounce (oz) which is mass/weight. [Most Americans don't understand the difference between mass and weight anyway, which is what @leevollrath2581 alluded to in their last sentence.]) But that wasn't the point...
The point, which @leevollrath2581 was trying to make, is that *most Americans insist on using a measure of volume (cups) to measure all of their ingredients in cooking and baking, rather than ANY unit of mass (grams being the most convenient.)* But... when *YOU* measure 1 cup of all-purpose flour, and *I* measure 1 cup of all-purpose flour, they can have *vastly different masses* - depending on how tightly packed the flour was.
Professional bakers/cooks advise to stir or sift the flour, then gently spoon it into a measuring cup, then swipe the excess off the top with a straight edge... but most people just DON'T DO that. They scoop the flour from the container (or worse, straight from the bag, which has settled during shipping) and press it against the side to level it off, leading to a MUCH more tightly packed substance, which has a significantly larger mass than my fluffy sifted flour with lots of incorporated air.
It is much more advisable to just put the flour (or whatever ingredient) on a food scale to get the mass. If *YOU* measure 125g of flour, and *I* measure 125g of flour, they're pretty likely to be the same amount, and turn out the the same results in a recipe. And, it really doesn't matter WHICH unit of mass they set the scale to... g, oz, kg, whatever - at least it's a consistent measurement.
Right?
No credible scientist outside of aeronautics (and maybe also nautics, idk) would use imperial.
What units are used in a school science class? Do you start out with si units or is learning metric your first job when you hit college level.
On the whole "Freedom Units" thing. Actually, the US Armed Forces are completly metric. They did the transition decades ago.
Yet NASA still uses imperial lol
@@franklingoodwin IIRC NASA uses SI units, not US units (which are different to Imperial units). This has literally caused the loss of satellites when people creating parts for them worked to inferior systems,
@@franklingoodwin NASA uses mostly metric. There have been some conversion errors with disastrous consequences because of it. Unfortunately for them, they have to do conversions to the US system every now and then. For manufacturing contractors for example.
@@franklingoodwinNASA engineers use metric. The capsule instruments read in imperial because it's what the astronauts are familiar with.
@@franklingoodwin NASA is NOT a branch of the Armed Forces.
Yes, I know. Their predecessor originated from the Air Force. But NASA is a completly different entity.
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).
Ireland switched to the metric system over time between the 1970's and 2005, the road signs were only changed to KMs in 2005.
The US has been metric since the 70/80s, but not in a way that "normal" people notice. All engineering is metric, and the imperial system is even defined by metric standard. One inch is 25.4mm. Cars and all production is also metric.
heck forget units of measurement, my parents grew up with old british money where one pound was divided into 20 shillings. One shilling was divided into 12 pennies. One penny was divided into two halfpennies, or four farthings, and they had to go from that to decimal money. Everyone did, literally overnight. One day everyone was using pound shilling and pence the next day 100 pennies in a pound. And people just dealt with it. Sure my grandparents used to say they still converted modern pounds into old money when they were in shops sometimes. But they still managed. And everyone under like 40 when it happened just changed over their thinking entirely. Same with metric. Here in the UK we'd been using some sort of imperial system for 1000 years or more and we were still able to figure metric out, however reluctantly. Its never too late, its just a matter of time
Jimmy Carter really wanted to push metric, and in many industries the switch to metric occurred. But Americans are an extremely stubborn people and many refused out right to learn it. There was a section of highway that was converted to metric near where I lived and some person went down the highway spray painting the imperial measurements over the metric ones.. :)
Yes, it's not impossible, it's inconvenient to do. It also was inconvenient to switch to the Euro in Europe, but we had prices in both currencies for a while and today I don't think back to the old currencies any more. It's more complex if it's about ALL units, but it will be easy for the children and the older ones will get used to it. And in the end, it will be much easier for everyone (because it's compatible to the rest of the world).
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.
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.
Only a goose would think Fahrenheit has more specificy 😂. Celsius uses the decimal system and can be infinitely specific.
@@ausforce1 Are you saying Fahrenheit does not use the decimal system?
Don't be silly.
@Tjalve70 no I'm not 😆, that was my point. Both Celsius and Fahrenheit use the decimal system, so the claim that Fahrenheit is more precise is STUPID.
@@ausforce1 Well, it's good that I didn't make that claim, then.
But you have to be pretty STUPID to think that I did.
@@ausforce1 to add, as an American, we like to laugh that celsius needs a decimal for specificity, but if you know that jingle (0 is freezing, 10 is not, 20 is comfy, 30 is hot), if I say the temp in celsius is six eight and you're shivering, you can infer that it's 16.8. If you're not, it's 26.8. If you're sweating it's 36.8.
I mean, nevermind the studies that suggest humans can't meaningfully intuit temperature changed less than 1 degree celsius.
We Americans just make lazy excuses thinking it's a funny joke. We can memorize that freezing in F is 32 but not that it's 0 in C? The units used by the British EMPIRE are "Freedom" units?
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!
The power of base-10 based measuring system
The power of not measuring with your feet, feels nice doesn't it? 😂
Science shouldn't be easy, science should be hard!
@@irgendwieanders2121 It should be hard for the right reasons, not because of stupid conventions which go against the grain of logical thinking.
@@frenchimp As someone who worked in this field for some time: Science should be made as easy as humanly possible.
(Then why the post? 'Cause this is YT...)
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.
Tbf the reason why wrenches and bolts are still in inches is because they've been standardized already (often in metric but kept their imperial names) and because its a lot easier to say and remember "7/16in" than "11,1125mm" and I say this as someone who was created on and is an everyday user of the metric system.
@@fernandomarques5166For me 7/16in is really hard to remember. 11.1125 is neat and pretty just 4 1s and 25. I also can imagine how long that is other than like a weird fraction?
Using fractions in imperial is the only thing that makes sense to me. Most design elements on precision components are done in 1/1000 of an inch. Just like milimeters to meters, this is actually their only unit to have an easily divisible amount of units. And for things like drill bits especially, imagining a small measurement as a fraction of something you are verh used to can be helpful. I am an engineer in Canada and using inches instead of mili or centimeters normally comes easier depending on what it is.
@@matthewhebbert2751 Yeah, 1/1000 makes sense, but not 7/16.
Just have them in metric
The US have been on the SI measurment system (metric) for several decades. The government legally switched a long time ago. I think it's just harder to get the population to switch in the US perhaps due to cultural differences. Veritasium made a great video about it :)
This is true, and IMO has caused some problems as Americans can read metric nutrition facts on their foods and not have a good mental image of what's in them. They can look at the label that says there are 39 grams of sugar in a 12-oz can of soda pop, and not be able to picture it, so they have no idea that that can has over 3 tablespoons of sugar in it!
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.
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)
If you look into the density table of various liquids, you might find out that most liquids are at most 50% off the water density, usually only 10-20% off. Only mercury, liquid metal alloys stand out with factor of 10x-13x.
Basically, you could treat all liquids as water to compute mass. However, the material of bottles (plastic, glass, aluminium) will give bigger offset in calculations.
conversion between unit is a strong point of metric....
1 L of water = 1Kg
1L is also 1000 cubic centimeter (wich is, because cubic, a cube of 10*10*10 cm)
@@MrMordethrhedan 1l is also 1mm*1m*1m which is useful to convert those l/m^2 rain values to mm of rain.
@@Taladar2003 Today I learned. Thanks.
When I buy beers I know three 500ml bottles weigh 1.5 kg
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.
Metric is arguably easier for the US to adapt compared to a new currency. Teach it in school and have all the Imperial numbers have the metric numbers in () and once the older generation "die out" and only those who know the metric roam the country, take down all imperial numbers
@@arftrooper44that’s the thing , though, metric is NOT universal, but completely arbitrary. While,localities have adopted different measures, these measures corresponded to something human. Hectopascal means nothing, but you can feel pound per square inch from Greece to Antartica, whether aborigines use inch or not for length. A half, quarter or eighth is also intuitive in terms of fraction and logarithmic behavior of nature. Not so with metric which is autistic and discarding all kinds of information. It seems more convenient to calculate the moon landing when doing the math on paper, but as an engineer you have no way of seeing immediately if your result makes any sense. There is maybe an even more universal unit than metric revolving around the Plank constant and quantum mechanics, fyi. Metric is totally schizo-autistic ethnic unit system for bureaucrats, not universal.
I was 11 when Greece adopted the Euro and it actually annoyed me that where I used to get 5000 drachma for daily kid expenses I now got "only" 20 euros, even though 20 euros was more. The only benefit was that the 2 euro coins is really pretty.
@@sfertonoc Problem with imperial is when you want to be specific. Most places use an inch as measure of "thumb" but that can be anything. My thumb is 3.5cm, so what is 6' in the US would be 4'4'' in "my measurements".
That is the Napoleon issue where the guy was 5'7'' in British (now only US) feet but 5'2'' in French feet.
So, a "pound per square inch" you need to know what you are measuring the pound against, as it can be a liter of Roman grain (the current US pound), but it can also be a libris punda of silver which is 20x as much. Then you need to know if it's "my inch", the french inch, or the US inch.
Water on the other hand is the the same and recognizable anywhere. A cubic decimetar of liquid water would weigh the same everywhere. And a meter is 1/10000 from the equator to the n. pole through Paris... not completely non-arbitrary, but at least consistent for everyone.
Yeah, do you people travel anywhere? You have to switch to another currency in another country, is the metric such a bigger deal?
Kilograms is not a measurement of weight. It is a measurment of mass. The metric unit for weight is newtons.
"How much do you weigh?"
"My mass is 70 kilograms 🤓"
Pounds are really a unit of mass as well. It’s just that colloquially or outside of science, everyone refers to mass as weight. So yes, kg is a measurement of weight by the non-scientific definition.
Given that we're all generally on earth under normal earth gravity conditions, the difference between mass and weight isn't super relevant to most people in their daily lives.
Metric should not be conflated with SI. For many legal purposes, such as trade, the kilogramme is a unit of weight. It may be a unit of weight which is calibrated to a standard gravity, but look at consumer laws and so on through the world and you will likely find things specified in terms of tonnes, kilogrammes and so on.
In the SI unit kilogramme is a unit of mass of course, but not everybody is a physicist or engineer, and referring to kilogramme as a unit of weight in everyday conversation, most commerce and so on is fine. Nobody goes to the shop and asks for 9.81 newtons of potatoes.
@@paradoxmo When the difference between mass and weight became important enough, the scientific and engineering community adopted pound-force as the unit of force and it's still used in some places (by which I mean the USA).
I do watch your channel mostly on my OLED tv and I appreciate how good your vids look on it. Now onto the metric system. I’m an engineer, so I’ve had to learn both systems. I love to bake and I had to start using a scale and weighing out ingredients in grams after I started downloading the Great British Bake Off recipes. And I discovered how much easier weighing everything in grams is.
i mean, cooking in baking has some leniency anyway in its measurements, so it doesnt matter that much imo there
Sweet! I try to have the dynamic range and colour grade perfect for tv :)
The mental gymnastics required to believe imperial measurements are the best to use is astounding.
lol
I don't think anyone actually thinks its the best system to use per say. Its legitmentally just that its good enough for most people's daily lives and its very challenging to rewire the brain to think in the other system. If you listened it took Evan years until he was able to flip it in his brain. Also there is a lot of signs and costs to move over. I will also say when it comes to distance like ball parking things by eye, Imperial is better for describing it if ballparking things, same thing with temperature.
Look it works well enough for the needs could it be better to move over to metric sure but since there is not really a need then it doesn't really matter
@@mal2ksc that literally makes no sense. If it’s in the US then any company doing business here should use those measurements.
If it’s not then yeah doing the conversions makes sense for what you said.
However, since America is a big player and an odd man out then it does make sense for the rest of the world to do the conversions for us for certain things. Mainly cooking related things which isn’t hard to include in a video since a lot of people will include metric for the international community
I think I have seen more rational arguments used by novax people than people who prefer empireal. It's as clear as the sun that it's plainly inferior from any conceivable point of view
@@dennisp8520you just need to do it once and then bam! you can just multiply. How amazing is that?
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.
Exactly! My grandmother still uses leagues for measuring distances related to farming. For everything else, she's 100% metric.
Exactly, get over yourself USA
Not so much forgotten, but we have got over ourselves.
The one that made me laugh is when I got an allotment and it was 9 rods - not just non-decimal but the size of a piece of land allotted to a Viking to build his house and garden on over 1000yrs ago. As a scientist, SI units rule but I love the little bits of history lurking in some of the relics
Metric is arbitrary yet suitable for speedy calculations. Imperial is practically and culturally informed. To be fully literate (aka fluent) in the science of measurement, one must understand both systems. In Temperature, Rankine provides an eloquence completely absent from metrics, with it's super-sized unit. For metrics to be taken seriously, show once and for all the base-ten system of time measurement! Till then even metrics must borrow from the Imperialists. How rough! How impure!!
@@jeromewesselman4653 Imperial is not a general system. Metric was invented to unify all traditional measuring systems. Even now, there are differences between American Imperial & British Imperial.
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.
Actually you're mostly water...
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
Shhh, don't mention calories (actually kcal), because that's not SI 🤫
1 cal only does this with pure water at sea level. If you are in Denver, this doesn't work. It's why Celsius is called metric but really isn't. The units of distance, volume, and weight all are universal - temperature is not.
@@FlyRick78 lol You can say that about everything in the metric system 😂 All these relations are for STP conditions, like 10 cm³ water = 1 kg. It still makes much more sense than Imperial.
@@laraneville9952 The definition of the calorie given here is basically correct though.
You are of course right that amounts of energy are mostly given in Joule or kWh.
When it comes to human daily energy consumption people often say "two thousand daily calories" when its actually 2000 kcal -> 2 million calories.
@@laraneville9952 4.18 Joules just doesn't have the same ring to it :D
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...
Never made mathematical mistakes? Why you working for a multinational company. You seem too smart for that.
@@johnconner4695It is way easier to work with metric sizes as they are multiples of 10. Instead of adding 1/16th of an inch to 3/8th of an inch or so (this is not extremely complicated, but there are others), you just add some "normal" numbers, maybe just move the dot to use larger/smaller units.
@@FlorinArjocu I don’t disagree with it being easier to work with lmao. I was just saying it is not hard to use both especially if you can do math or have a phone. Most of the imperial units you don’t use anyway. You already know 12 inches is a foot. The complaint is memorizing the conversions. Which isn’t that hard.
@@johnconner4695 "constantly". A mistake, even a dumb one, once in a while is acceptable. When the word "Constantly" starts being use, There Are Problems.
@@johnconner4695 Working with an easier system = less mistakes...
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! 😊🎉
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...
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.
It's supposed to be slugs for mass and pounds for force.
The best part is that there are special imperial engineering tape measures which use decimal feet
@@Sonny_McMacssonHunting slugs everytime you need to know the mass of something seems highly inconvenient
Technically kgf (kilograms force) does exist in the metric system but as it is basically 1 kgf = 10 N is not that hard to convert
Edit to the scientists out there the word "basically " means "approximately " in this context
@@tomaszkarwik6357 What kind of weird gravity do you have where that's an equality?
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.
I too, grew up in Canada... I was in Grade 4 or 5 when the "change" came in.. yeah.. it was a bit confusing for some... some more than others'' it was harder on older folks just because its hard to change a lifetime of thinking.. but.. we bit the bullet, knowing that the confusion would "age out", so to speak. it became the LAW, that food had to be sold in kg's, and fuel had to be sold in litres... BUT, that didn't mean retailers couldn't post prices in BOTH systems, as long as metric was first.. it allowed older folks to still use the system they knew, while slowly adjusting, or, as I sad, aging out.
I'm Lucky.. it happened for me at a time when my mind was still ripe for learning new tricks. Today, if and when I wish to know th eequivelant, my mind almost instantly makes a "close estimate", and If I want an exact conversion, its a simple, quick, mental calculation... as someone who "grew up" on both systems.. I can say, unequivocally, metric is superior, both practically, and scientifically.👍🏼✌🏼🇨🇦
I live in Canada and bro we’re a mess. Overall very metric, but lots of “cups,” “pounds,” and “feet” get thrown around constantly.
Like, how tall am I? 5’ 8”. How long of a walk? Oh, 1 km? That’s not bad. How long is that thing? 10 cm? Ok.
My childhood cat was about 5 lbs. 100 g for $5? That’s a horrible price. How heavy am I? 150 lbs. What, you want kilos? I don’t fucking know 😭😭😭
Oh, it's worse than that here in the Great White North.
Construction: the industry is dominated by american products and so is almost exclusively american imperial.
Fuel: Metric now, but the generation before me remembers the imperial system and how our gallon is bigger than their gallon.
Food: metric is used... officially. Things like produce and meat are still sold by the pound with the metric weight beside, but we canucks don't bother with fractions in these measurements; it's all decimal.
Also, let me comment here as one educated after the transition that imperial weight measurements never stick in my head. Is it 8 oz/lb or 16?
Finally, temperature. I understand what the author comments on here, but in a place where -40 with the windchill is a regular occurance, both systems are fine. By the by, -40 is where C and F are the exact same value. I prefer celsius because at higher than zero it will rain and at less than zero it will snow. Simple. Want fun stories, talk to border officers who see yanks coming up with snowboards in July to Ontario. Sorry, those hills and mountains are not whitecapped year round.
Oh, and because medical thermometers come from the states, I still think of 98.6 for human temperature, but knowing that's equal to 37 is just as good. Saying I had a fever of 105 sounds much more impressive than a fever of 40.
So, yeah. Gen X were the last ones taught Imperial in school, but parts of it still linger.
@@BorealisNights The same happened in most countries in Europe when the Euro currency was adopted: a transition period when both currencies were allowed and even after that the old currency had to be visible as the second option. I find myself sometimes still converting sums into our old currency for reference even though it's nothing to do with anything today (the value is way off just due to inflation). 😂
To be clear, I only do it when I'm "comparing" how much things cost now vs then, not in every day use.
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.
Most high schools have football fields in the majority of the country, so a lot of people who went to high school know what a football field looks like.
The weather in the UK is very easy to describe. Its cold or it's unusually warm will cover most situations.
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.
US is fully metric. By law anyway. The official stance is that they are using it and all their measurements are defined by conversion rates to metric, because metric is already defined by abstract unchanging physical constants.
Il reste pourtant quelque chose qui continue à être mesuré en pouces partout dans le monde : le diamètre des roues de la plupart des véhicules (même si leur largeur est mesurée en millimètres). Michelin a essayé de proposer des roues et pneus en diamètre millimétrique dans les années 70 (la gamme TRX) mais ça n'a jamais pris.
As for the point it will never replace imperial people said the same in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia as for water we are 70 percent water.
@chucku00 True, even in the metric world, some things are measured in inches. Like the example of tires, I have an understanding of how big a 26-inch bicycle tire is, but I have no clue what the metric equivalent should be. Also, like others have mentioned, the sizes of nuts, bolts and wrenches are all over the place, some are using metrics and others inches.
And, not to forget the nautical and aerial measurements, with (nautical) miles and feet.
@@dr.oetqer If you want to calculate the rolling circumferences of tyres to see if you can interchange them, you have to use both. I have a bad remembrance, but i will always know that an inch is 25,4 mm.
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.
The kilogram was originally defined as the weight of 1 liter of water at 4c, so at room temperature you will lose a tiny bit of precision as the density of the water decreases, but not enough to make any difference in the kitchen.
@@caffeinatedlinuxwe also preheat our oven in the UK ...so things get perfectly baked. 220°c
@@CyanideSunshines Is it truly getting baked if the number 420 isn't involved? Which is the entire joke. To get baked (to get extremely high) you need to have a lot of 420 (marijuana). There are plenty of recipes I've used where it asks me to preheat to 420F. 420C in the other hand is just unrealistic.
@@caffeinatedlinux ...I'm ashamed to admit I didn't get the joke in the first comment, gg
@@caffeinatedlinuxwood-fired pizza ovens are around 420°C so you can also get baked with celsius too (and they're more delicious than 420°F pizzas)
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.
The USA has never used Imperial! They use US Customary measures. And there are, or were, differences ranging from so slight as to be ignorable in normal life to being substantial (pints and gallons being obvious examples).
Also, while UK roads appear to be Imperial, things like motorway distance location signs (mileposts!) are set at 500 metres apart, and countdown to exit markers are at 300, 200 and 100 meters. Even if referred to in some places as being 300, 200 and 100 yards.
And to confuse further, countdown markers to railway level crossings are not at any specific distance. They just divide up the distance into three equal measures between the first and the actual crossing.
(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.
I also sew a lot but I grew up with the metric system and I kind of feel the same way, of course if I'm making something I have to convert from inches to cm just because we don't have tape measures in inches but if something says for example half an inch of seam allowance or 3 inch wide straps I have a good idea of what that looks like and don't have to convert anything.
another kinda weird point is that I'm instinctively better at guessing length in inches than in cm even though I barely use it, but sewing in metric units has definitely evened this out
It's like me and Imperial. I'm russian, we use metric here. But most of the cool cars and quality car UA-cam are made in the US. I started watching lots of american car videos. At first I struggled converting inches to cm, MPH to km/h. Now, after like 10 years of exposure I convert EV range INTO MILES, because 300 miles on a Tesla is such a convenient standard. I realised that we don't need to understand how much exactly is N inches or M miles, we really just need to understand which place in the hirearchy that number is. I no longer need to convert offroad SUV ground clearance into mm, cos I know how well all the key market players do in inches.
But what I still can't do is understand car dimensions in inches. American cars are so huge, I found it worthless to even try to compare with what we have on the roads here. In fact, I don't know most european car's dimensions in mm either. I've aleays understood sizes by classes, not specific numbers. I kinda can say if the wheelbase given in inches is long thanks to old LR Defender scale and how the new Defender doesn't follow it with ~118 inches instead of 110, but I can't predict which models will likely have longer wheelbase than the one given and which shorter, which I can estimate in metric.
But the first thing that I learned in Imperial is prices in USD. Now I convert even our local car prices into dollars just to have some idea if I'm paying too much.
Irony indeed. Metric is used in every country except one and a half.
@@uis246 even one and a half country is quite a lot of people. It's more than the amount of speakers of most languages on Earth. Chinese and English are in the billions, Spanish and French are..., idk, I guess in hundreds of millions, while most languages are like in hundreds and sometimes even tens of thousands. But nobody tells them to give up their native tongues and switch to English.
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.
And using cups to measure dry volumes isn’t imperial. It’s just weird.
Yes, the Imperial pint is 20 fluid ounces whilst the US is 16, hence the standard steel drum used for oils etc is 200 litres, 55 US gallons or 44 Imperial gallons
The Imperial system was actually meant to be a rationalisation of the overly complex and confusing older UK system where units were often specific to what was being measured.
Imperial got rid of a lot of obsolete units and made things like the oz the same mass for all commodities with the exception of gold (which retained the troy oz). Things like the fl oz were also ditched in favor of a volume.
As the US was already independent at that time so never adopted the ‘improved’ imperial system so the US customary measure (USC) is more related to the pre-imperial system that even the UK thought was dumb 200 years ago.
The US and UK have two different imperials because they both standardized it separately after the American separation from the empire. Beforehand it was messy and complex and inconsistent everywhere in the empire.
@@ScottJB Until the Swedish manufacturer Carl Edvard Johansson was asked to make some inch based gauge blocks for the USA the USA did not have a standard inch, it varied around the country. Johansson found the average size of the inch was close to 25.4mm so he made his gauge blocks based on 1" = 25.4mm and that is how the inch has been defined since then.
As far as the ship sailing for America, the thing to really think about is how much would it cost to retool every manufacturing facility to use metric machinery. Every screw? Gotta be metric. What do you need with metric screws? Metric drill bits. What do you put that in? A metric drill. And that's just for the screws. All the while, infrastructure created with the imperial units will need to be supported and maintained for decades to come, so BOTH systems will need to be maintained in parallel, and at similar volume for a significant amount of time during the change.
Plus, the whole world decided the ship has sailed on metric time units. I can only think it's for similar reasons
Canadian here, we use both, F for cooking, C for temp, and working construction it’s useful to use both, we’re odd
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.
I was recently in Ireland and noticed speed signs in kilometres in the Republic and in miles in the North, I think there were a couple ones with both near the border. I suppose it must be one hell of a headache for those who have to cross over frequently.
We humans will come to accept as "normal" any conditions that don't immediately kill us.
My grandfather got used to decimal money, euros and metric with ease
@@tbotalpha8133 Very much so. Though sometimes it works against us to depressing extents.
Distance on road signs in Ireland was in KM for a long time - possibly since the '70s - before the speed limits and signs went to KPH in 2005.
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.
1km = 1000m
1 ton = 1000kg
1L = 1000mL
1 mile = 5,280 feet...?
1 gallon = 128 oz...? Excuse me?
Well every unit in Imperial can be converted into each other unit as well (you can convert inches into miles if you want). But I assume you meant that in metric it is simply a matter of moving the decimal a few places left or right.
@@dealbreakerc No, I meant in converting ml to cm or litres to km, they can all be converted into each other.
@@overthemoon34 ugh no
You cannot convert a ml into a cm. You can convert a ml into a cm³ or another volume measure. You can also convert a volume into a mass if you know or are given the density of the material in question. But again, that isn't any different from imperial. An oz of water at normal temperature and pressure has a given density that would allow one to convert an oz of water into a cubic inch measure if someone so chose to.
@@dealbreakercactually, you can. A milliliter weighs a gram, for instance.
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!
In the '90, I was running a branch of a multi-national chemical company out of Singapore. Once we had a sizable order for an expensive additive. We asked one of our US and European plants for quotations.
The US offer was better in price (if u had a calculator) and speed. However, it came in $ /'gallon' and some weird packaging units, maybe gallons as well, which both were non-negotiable.
The customer, (maybe without calculator?) needed the metric packaging for his own production (X 50 kg drums for each batch etc.) We had to order the same stuff from Europe.
A tiny example of how the U.S., run in parts by 'Hillbillies', shoots itself in the knee (a bit more serious than cooking recipes I believe).
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.
Canada's also in a "special" situation when it comes to units of measurement, because we live next to the US. Based on the activity, we still use the imperial system over metric, when we don't just mix both based on the step we're at. A good example of it is cooking. We use Fahrenheit for the oven, but metric for measuring ingredients (in a very American manner, mind you).
@@MsVilecat Usually the only time I use Fahrenheit for the oven is if I live in a building with old appliances - the oven sometimes doesn't have both listed.
@@ecardecardian7839 The most prime example of imperial holding place in rural Canada (at least in the prairies) that comes to mind is the mile roads. Because the grid road system was created using the imperial Dominion Land Survey, and we can't just resurvey and redo the entire rural grid road system without it costing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars (as well as possibly having to move residences, fighting to resurvey farmland etc), rural grid roads will always be in miles.
yes, and all cars sold in America today have speedometers that display both units, which is convenient for driving back and forth across either of our major land borders.
@@MsVilecatthe UK is strange in the same way. We buy fuel in litres but measure fuel consumption in Mile per Gallon.
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.
"... a lot of change in the US has to make financial sense first."
Truer words have never been spoken.
Crazy Muhricans and their capitalism :D
I bet there are tons of examples though already where the metric system would have saved a lot of money.
I remember that story where a NASA mission failed because they had gotten some part from a company that didn't use metric, while NASA - obviously - does everything in metric. Anyway, that must have been hundreds of millions of Dollars down the drain just because someone used their fantasy measurements.
that's a smart way to do it
Impressive and well done.
I'm pretty similar, American in the US... Several years ago, I started going out of the country fairly regularly for vacations. Several years back I transitioned my phone/watch, vehicle, personal life to metric. It's easier to think in the same units wherever I am. @15:27, technically the US Gov is on the metric system; it is the "Preferred system" for trade and commerce. However, there was no mandate for its use in the private sector, though all US customary units are technically defined on metric conversions, ie 1 foot is .3048m.
It just can be done slowly. Just transition every day items over to metric every once in a while, like a few things a year.
The 2 liter bottles for example. It seems to be an accepted measurement in the usa.
Just change cans over as well. People know what it is in ounces, just make companies print metric on it. Eventually everyone will be used to it and won't know any better and understand how they relate to eachother as well.
In a decade or 2 it will be ingrained into american minds as well. It is all about exposure.
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.
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.
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
That's the same way we Americans thik about miles. 60 mph is 1 mile per minute. When we see a sign saying our destined city is 30 miles away, we're thinking hour hour to go.
@@benengle9621 yeah but who drives at 60mph on the motorway
If all the road signs are in Miles, the car's speedo is marked up in MPH, it's easier to use miles and MPH !
It seems the UK never converted from Miles / Hour speed restrictions to avoid having a lot of accidents during the switchover.
It's similar reasoning as to why we still drive on the left hand side of the road in the UK, with "right hand drive" vehicles.
Swapping over was considered sometime back, but it got rejected on the basis of all the accidents that were likely to happen during the changeover.
In the UK that'd be 74.5mph = breaking the law! And for better EV range, I normally drive at 56mph = a nice round 90kmh! (90.104), so 1km=40s, 25m/s.
@@karlosh9286 A lot of European countries changed from left to right. Portugal and Sweden, for e.g., also drove on the left like the UK but changed after some traffic safety campaigns. Risk of accident is low enough to not be a deal breaker. The thing about UK and Australia is that they are islands and do not have the same issues that let to the standardization of the continent, so there isn't really any need besides economics to changed it.
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
That’s surprisingly wholesome
1966 was a big year in Australia, we switched from Pounds to Dollars too. 🇦🇺
@@johno9507 - decimal currency - kinda matched the decimal measure ment system that is metric. I'm so glad I grew up after LSD - pounds shillings and pence - not the psychedlic. Try measuring a dose of the psychedilic in imperial. 13/469ths of a grain or something?
@@johno9507 but we moved more slowly into metric measures 1970 for general measurementt and 1974 for road speeds
I can remember our rulers at school had both cm and inches on them in the 70s. I grew up with metric, but most of the adults in my life where more comfortable with imperial. It was interesting in our house, I knew metric, my step-mother knew imperial and my dad was comfortable with both, so he often did quick calculations so we'd all know the measurements in the system we knew best.
The debate between using weight or volume for cooking is not an imperial versus metric issue. You could use milliliters of butter or packed brown sugar and still have the same problem with packing density. Oils are pretty reliably 8 grams per deciliter which highlights the issue. Packing density on powders is a bigger problem.
It's still funny to me that Americans are so proud to kick the English out but still use the King's feet as measurement.
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.
According to its defenders, it's all thanks to using the Imperial measurement system that the USA is the only country in the world that has sent humans to the Moon. Even though the rumours say von Braun absolutely hated the Imperial system.
Americans tends to assume that most of the developed world disagrees with American policies and practices just for the sake of spirited conversation.
Americans can't find Europe on a map so how probable is that they are going to switch to metric. Too much work for the brain.
A animated channel called History Matters has a short video about why American never adopted the metric system, according to it, everytime the bureaucracy side of things got surpassed in the way to adopt the metric system, the most foolish reasons halted the whole process, one of them the believe that America was such a great nation that every other would eventually be molded to their image.
@@carlspam5335 "... the believe that America was such a great nation that every other would eventually be molded to their image." - and they are right.
190 countries in the world have to use Imperial when dealing with the US in business, economics, military, tourism, etc, etc.
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.
And 2 different speed measurements Ireland has KMH and NI has MPH all on one little island
When did that switch happened? I reckon around 2008 or so?
Metric was well established when I first drove, but my first car was US made, so I had to know the important numbers 60kph, 80kph, 100kph in mph. I haven't had one since but still remember the conversion numbers like it was yesterday
@@Sekir80 2005
@@MOSSFEEN Thanks!
Fun fact recipes used to be even worse not that long ago,
some times you would buy a cook book that would only tel you the ingredients, not the amounts. a lot of the time it would be something like "you'll need a little bit of this, some of that, an eye of bread and this flower I found in my garden"
I grew up in Canada during the transition, and I can think in and use both--except for Celsius--I still have to translate that. Also, back then Canada did use full-size 40 oz quarts, making the shift to the US where a liter was a little more than a quart rather than a little less extra confusing. However, you did miss out the biggest advantage of Imperial--a foot can be divided evenly by 2, 3, and 4--unlike a meter. In fact, nothing metric can be easily divided by three.
1 Meter divided by 3 is 1/3 meters. You're welcome.
@@dragonlord1225and how many whole centimeters is that?
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.
I never get the "what is 20m like?" It's close enough to 20yds or 22 if you want to be more accurate, but usually 10% is close enough
A big step us usually around a meter in estimate, I believe that's was a common distance measure it supplanted. So 20m = 20 steps. Of course it varies by person and height, but it gives you a rough idea.
"I'm still having ten fingers dude, like you, your father and their grands before."
I can get what you said and did, I'd actually have made the same if forced, like you. But nothing and nobody in the world may make me unsee I'm doing something extremely stupid, or convince me he isn't.
Yes I will use your sh!t, if forced to. But you'll never hear me say it's a pie. Because it's bullshit. Straight and plain.
@@memsesosmo5084 with this I hope you realize how stupid the royal system is.
In metric we have one only conversion factor, guess? it's 10. :) Yes, 10! Easy, isn'it?
Are you still in troubles remembering it? Just count your goddamn fingers.
Damn I can't really believe there's people apologizing its use. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, for sure since someone invented something better.
...Which happened centuries before, just to say.
It's not Eu metric it's France and worldwide metric system
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 definitely agree that metric is the gold standard for science in America (most of my metric knowledge comes from physics) but I think engineering is still largely dominated by the imperial system. Specifications, tolerances, temperature limitations, and hardware all seem to be entirely imperial. I'm sure there are some American firms that use metric, but outside of 3D printing and scanning, my experience has been entirely imperial.
"Why should it be easy for us when it can be difficult"
What is this? Let me explain.
I am a civil engineer, european. I grew up with the metric system and am only used to it. To be honest, the imperial one seems terribly stupid and outdated to me. I worked with two US colleagues in the construction of a plant for automobile engines in Bulgaria (Europe). To everyone's surprise (mine and other colleagues') they used 100% metric system. This saved us a lot of trouble converting units. Metric is a system, imperial is not a system, it's a mess. It works for everyday life, but not in engineering and science. When dealing with complex and composite characteristics such as heat transfer, torque, flexural strength, geological stresses, magnetic induction, etc. then things get really, really rough in the Imperial.
And what about the temperature measurement. The Celsius scale is extremely easy, convenient and intuitive. 0°C, water freezes (at sea level), 100°C water boils. The human body is 36.7°C. It is hardly possible to come up with something simpler and easier. What is this 32° F and 212° F, what is this 5/9 scale?
We have discussed this question with my American colleagues: Why are you still using this medieval nonsense?
They answered me with a laugh: "Why should it be easy for us when it can be difficult."
@@theoriginaldanster Since I work in bioprocess engineering, I am perhaps closer to the sciences and not pure US engineering? I know my mechanical engineering colleagues are constantly converting between imperial and metric measurements. Then again, I probably shouldn't be surprised that the vast majority of US engineering is imperial given that NASA lost ~$125M due to a difference of pound-seconds^s vs Newton-seconds^2 (referring to my first comment).
I can say this as a US citizen: I think we're idiots for stubbornly sticking with the imperial system. I agree with DarkPriest-rx7tw, we like making things needlessly difficult...
@@Aoihoshikage3446 I think a lot of it for me is that I usually work around aviation, which is all imperial, and also that a lot of machining equipment (probably billions of dollars in tooling costs worth) is imperial and based on fractions or thousandths of inches, along with raw materials, so designs are also thought of that way.
I don't think either really holds an advantage in mechanical engineering otherwise because realistically you're still choosing a not whole number of units to manufacture something to and also the actual engineering side with physics and everything is built around metric.
Yes,
It is all about exposure.
It took me many years to get used to imperial units (maybe besides weight).
I am still struggling with hight and miles and volume units (it is so strange that imperials have different scales for length and volume, why just not add cube to it aka cubic meter).
Oz is still strange for me. And sometimes forget that 60 mp/h is not just regular city speed and 80mp/h is actually very fast.
I get used to temperature, even if was bizarre that 1 F doesn't equal 1 C, while 1K is equal 1C. I had to put it only as relative aka 75 is best temperature
80s is getting hot, 90 hot and 100 is death, and 50-60 chilli, 30-40 cold , 10-20 COLD, bellow zero very cold.
F even if not useful for science, it is not that bad for everyday people.
But I would advise to learn metric as I would advise to learn foreign language.
If you ever would want to travel abroad, it would be nice and very fulfilling to know.
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.
Moved to korea, and similarly, my brain had to get used to monetary translation: KRW to USD. Took me barely a month before I just understood prices without translating in my head or on my phone. Also the metric system has been an easy transition. Imo, immersion can easily change almost anyone's mind
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.
I don't know who told you that "whichever size you use is the same for all ingredients" that's not how US Cups work. Mainly though you're not understanding what a "cup" is. When we say 2 cups of flour we aren't talking about a cup you drink out of but a Measuring Cup. Which is a specific kitchen measuring device that always has the same volume. Drinking cup sizes are arbitrary but a Measuring cup is a volume standard no matter what kind or where you buy.
(Well there is a dry measuring cup and a liquid measuring cups and those are technically different sizes but that's not the point.)
@@joshb8440the thing is that a 'cup' is still not clear. The US cup and the UK cup and even the Australian cup are all different sizes
@@Yoonie_Stars Fair enough, but the point I was trying to get at was that when people say Cup in this context they aren't talking about a kitchen mug or drinking cup. It's still a horrible way to measure things in cooking, but it's got to be way worse if you're trying to use a tea cup.
I collect cookbooks and got so fed up with cups etc. I stopped buying books that didn’t include metric 😂
@@joshb8440 It was actually a few people I chat with regularly on Twitter. One of them shared a recipe and I didn’t get the whole cup thing, so I asked and a few of them replied as I mentioned. The measuring cup makes more sense to me now, so thanks for clarifying. Wonder why they didn’t mention that…? 🤔 (That’s a rhetorical question, no reply expected 😁)
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
We never really DID understand our own. It's not made to be understood. Try matching a drill bit to a screw to drill an anchor. It's laughable.
The last 2 are more jokey. The last is basically just saying salt to taste, aka it varies
Generally a dash is like 1/8 tsp
The US uses metric. I don't know what the fuck everyone in here is on. If you work a job with measurements that isn't construction, you use metric. you are taught metric and imperial at the same time. they don't want to do a full switch for 2 reasons: The olds, and the costs. if you have something like...say, a uh-60 blackhawk, designed in imperial. you can't convert that to metric. where the fuck am i going to find a 9.63mm socket? the new contracts are all in metric, but you have to keep imperial around for the old systems. One european tank contract came in, I want to say 1990, and they were in metric, the government told them they had to convert it to imperial. The company canceled the contract because it was more cost efficant just stop and lose what they invested than it was to redesign from the ground up.
Personally, I can use both...like most canadians, and brits....But yea, we 100% you both. the only one I think that will never go away is MPH because resigning a landmass roughly the size of europe over something so menial and pointless...yea that will be our "stone".
Imperial units are anything but "non-scientific." After all, the dimensions, the weight, etc. of an object are independent from the units used to measure them. I grew up using both, and I have to say that both metric and imperial units have their advantages and disadvantages. One annoying disadvantage of the metric system is that "10" is not the best base to work with, as it is only divisible by 2 (handy) and by 5 (very useless); inches in the imperial system have the advantage of being divided by 2 until you get to down the desired precision.
you forgot "football pitch long" xD
You said a bunch on volume but didn't mention that "Imperial" volumes in the US and UK are *not* the same. Miles too, but the difference is much less notable.
Pints and floz are smaller in the UK, and gallons are (much) smaller in the US. It's partly due to standardising on different subtypes, but it means that "Imperial" measures can't even reliably be used in different regions. It constantly causes confusion when comparing fuel mileage.
Jonny Harris's exceptionalism is truly something to behold 😅
Im a researcher at a university in aerospace engineering. What I love about metric is how I can rearrange equations with strange combinations of units and easily solve for the value I'm missing. Just yesterday I was messing around with "lb/hr/hp" and "kg/s/W" (a.k.a brake-specific fuel consumption).
Usually I think of measurements in terms of dimensions like speed = m/s = [Length]/[Time] because it's most helpful knowing when I'm allowed to cancel dimensions out in equations. But the best part of using metric to rearrange something is if you use the base SI units like I do, you come out on the other side finding that you didn't need to make any silly imperial conversions like horsepower to british thermal units or from pounds to slugs. For each 1 Newton of force I exert on a paper cup, if I pushed it 1 metre in 1 second, I have exerted 1 Watt of energy.
With that said, it's funny how often I still encounter imperial units because so many big aerospace design firms are American (defence contractors), which also means a lot of tooling for manufacturing and maintenance is still in imperial and unavoidable too.
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.
The cups are fine, and the main reason that we use grams in that case is because we didn't just write the ounces number down. It's completely arbitrary, as the scale will give us both. Grams are slightly easier because they're smaller, but honestly it's not that big of a deal. In practice, you wouldn't want to switch varieties of flour, as there's often other impacts on the recipe that can result.
I love cooking and using weight over volumetric is the only actual advantage when cooking. My mental tabulations when remembering recipes are mostly ratios anyway. Outside of baking though I almost never use a thermometer and I always cook to taste. I can see the shimmer of oil, the evaporation of water on a skillet, the rolling boil, taste the spices, etc.
So, how much does the different type of flour weigh in a 200ml cup... And accordingly, the properties it has, in quantity or weight, are assessed...
I actually described a justification for both measurement systems…
But I'm a beer man, for me a cup is 500ml...
:D :D :D
@@AlienInSider "1 cup" has different meanings in different countries. It's 250ml in the UK, but 240ml in some other countries. It also depends how fine the flour is. Doves Farm gives the weight of 1 UK cup of flour as 120g, but if it's sieved then it's 110g, but 175g of pasta flour or 155g of wholemeal flour. So that can have quite an impact when you're baking.
@@southvillechris As I asked the author of the video, a kind, why the imperial system is composed of a standard of one leg part... foot! Whose? Napoleon, David or Goliad ;)
It's much easier to move the decimal point ;)
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.
Metric is indeed superior in engineering. 11/32", no thanks!
As a mid 40s brit I find *estimating* distance and weight with metric really hard. But for actual precision fuggetaboudit, metric all the way.
My 16 year old son has no issue estimating in metric. Clearly it can be learned it's just a 30-40 year (i.e. multi generational) change.
When I watch American DIYers building their houses and they say things like, "I need 5 and 3 eighths here plus 4 and 5 nineths" I scream. Should I be impressed by the constant mental maths or should they not be allowed near tools because they are too dumb to use metric?! (Option B)
And I say that as an American ex-pat who does a lot of DIY and furniture/stuff manipulations into small spaces. When I ask the lumber yard for the dimensions of a 5mm sheet of plywood, they tell me in mm and they can tell me in mm how much is lost in a cut. I don't have to figure out what 3 eighths of an inch is.
@@sarahrosen4985 I'm constantly impressed by the mental arithmetic skills of people who work in imperial and fractions. They're *clearly* not dumb at maths. I *need* metric because I am!
@@jezlawrence720 😊 I need metric because I already have enough to do. 🙂
My thoughts on the C vs F discussion, the actual temperature impression is very much dependent on humidity, wind and sunshine. My weather app tells me, x°C but it feels like y°C because of reasons. So having more nuance in F when giving outside temperature is kinda useless in my opinion when considering perceived temperature.
100% agree. I never understood that point about farenheit givin more specific temp info. The temperature is never an accurate indicator of how comfy you will feel when going out anyway. Wind, cloud and humidity will rule over that. Thus the 'inaccurate' temp given in C is good enough for general info and golden on the specifics of ice or not.
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.
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.
Yes, just like me. I also measure all my gold always in kilograms. It doesn't get more than a few dozen that way.
Well I don't know any imperial measurement that's roughly 330ml,
So I'm gonna assume it's based on the Litre and rounded down for legal reasons.
@@BramLastname Yes, when we order drinks here at restaurants, we usually say "a half" or "a third" of a liter. Except for a small beer which is 300ml, because glasses are made that way for some reason.
@@pejgrio1809 From what I've been told the beer glasses is due to international standards,
Most beer glasses are standardised, so 1 beer is roughly the same as 1 glas of wine or 1 shot of whiskey,
When it comes to alcohol contents in ml.
I don't really know why this is a thing,
But apparently that's the reasoning behind it.
not sure where you're all getting 330 ml from.. I'm in Canada, and our sodas(coke, for example) come in lots of sizes, from 200 ml to 3 litres.. but the typical size of a can of pop, or a beer.. is 355ml(12 oz).. its only pop and beer bottles, that seem to come in 330ish ml.
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
We call these the Galileo units in Germany.
Swimming pools are perfect for medium to short distances, it is very easy to visualize the number of pools you have to walk to a given location, the reference is 50 or 25 meters
LoL So American Soccer. Americans will sometimes count the distance in American football fields or basketball courts.
@@leonardo8461 I never could or did visualize distances this way. And I frankly never cared. I just walk. And if it's too far to walk, I'll take a bike or a car or public transport. Who actually needs to know "this will be 5 pool lengths"? Nobody.
@ good for you... ignoring the fact that the context of the comment was the comparison of distances with football and sport fields, and so I don't usually go around thinking about swimming pools... I did use the pool quite some times when I needed to figure out how far away something was (for really short distances), simply because I'm used to swimming pools, other people maybe have their personal reference, you probably have your as well... example: that thing is approx 30 meters away...then, for long distances I don't ususally think about it ofc, but, if I have to, I refer to kilometers, which could be useful when you are going somewere and you want to have an idea how much time may it takes given your walk speed
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.
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.
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.
ORDNUNG. MUSS. SEIN.
"Professional chefs are all using metric"... yes and no.
For weighing ingredients, it is 95% metric, and the other 5% is mostly for weighing meats, especially when talking meat-heavy dishes (eg. BBQ in the U.S.) Still 95% is huge, and this includes a very heavy migration over the last 10 years for Americans to use grams for flour, and in some American kitchens for everything else also. This is probably what you were referring to.
For volumetric, it's still a mish-mash. Even many professional chefs in freakin' Germany use teaspoons (5mL) and tablespoons (15mL) at times. "Cups" are rarer in Germany, but I've still seen it in German recipes within the last decade, so yeah....
Personally, I'm a gun-toutin' red-blood 'Murican, and I would prefer to switch 100% to metric (which makes me weird, but also illustrates why stereotypes can be deceiving).
No it isn't. When the amounts are off the worst thing that happens is that the food is bad. Most cooking in the world is done by eyeballing, and most of it tastes ok or better.
Building things need exact measures or live threatening bad things are gonna happen. That's where you really see how much easier and logical the metric system is.
The weird thing is that section of the video didn't actually compare metric weights vs imperial weights, it compared metric weights and imperial *volume.* Comparing weights would be grams vs ounces, not grams vs cups.
@@irrevenant3that's because that's the difference between cooking in old US method of volumes and standard metric system of measuring solids in mass, therefore grams or kg, and most folks like me converting are skipping the Imperial/SAE weight system ad going directly to the much simpler metric, which has been enabled by electronic scales made for the global market. Fortunately my primary baking book uses both for home baking and straight metric for commercial baking. You'd have to manually convert any old recipes, but the conversions are usually right on the flour bag or whatever ingredient you use.
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 do wonder of it will ever change to Kelvin.
@@ToppledTurtle834 there isn't much point in my opinion. Kelvin is just Celsius shifted to start at 0K. So it would be the same scale bur with all the numbers really big which doesn't make sense in everyday life
why kelvin is just celsius but more annoying@@ToppledTurtle834
I don't see one as better than the other. You could argue that F is a 0-100 scale of human comfort. Really it's just whatever you're used to. Boiling and freezing point of water are just numbers really. I don't think it's that helpful.
@@cabobs2000 Another thing to remember is most salted roads ice at about 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit is also more discrete. A degree is a smaller bit of temperature whereas Celsius forces everything into a 100 point scale between pure water freezing and boiling at sea level. Fahrenheit is calibrated against human body temp against a brine at freezing. The initial idea was that 100 would be the average human body temp, but it was calibrated under a fever.
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.
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.
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.
recently i learned about a thing called a wine gallon, that is apparently different from a normal gallon, which is still used in some industries
There's the weight ounce, the fluid ounce, the US fluid ounce, and the Imperial fluid ounce. How many fluid ounces in a pint? It depends which country you are in.
@@briancampbell179 you forgot the troy ounce used for precious metals
There's a beautiful Horrible Histories sketch where Queen Victoria is going on a carriage ride and asks how far it is. The sketch devolves into all the different types of miles used in the UK at the time, so by the end she gets fed up and declares that the country will only use one type of mile from that point on.
There are also similar sketches about timezones (someone missed their train because their watch was set to the timezone of a different city) and money (someone disembarks a ship from abroad and asks to exchange some money, but gets confused by all the different terms).
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.
I don't know if you remember now, but was your reaction to having to relearn decimal currency "OMG, thank goodness!"?
I wasn't around for the but if they'd taught me "Okay, there are 20 shillings per pound, and there's 12 pence per shilling so there's 240 pence per pound" then turned around and went "Actually, it's just changed, we use dollars now and there's 100 cents in each" I feel like that'd be my reaction - it's one less step.
My parents went through the same thing in South Africa. My mom still estimates people's height in feet and used to use pounds and ounces when talking about the weight of a newborn baby.
The imperial system is still quite entrenched when in the plumbing business. You buy x metres of 1/2 inch or 3/4 copper pipes, etc.
I was on the cusp of changing from primary to secondary school when we changed our currency. We had 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound - and my poor brain found simple maths very difficult. When we switched to the metric system and had 100 pennies to the pound it was wonderful!
Weight is a whole 'nother matter. I have no idea how much I weigh in Kg, or lbs, but I understand how many stones I am. It's just what I've been used to, and I freely acknowledge that the metric system makes a lot more sense.
At secondary school I used SI units for all science subjects, and found it easy because I was learning things from scratch and the units just went with what I was learning.
Speed and distance will always be a puzzle for me. I used to run and I did that in metric, but when I'm driving I do so in Imperial. My children (young adults) learned everything in metric, but have grown up with Imperial-speaking parents. They're sort-of bilingual. Ish.
Britain is a confusing place!
to make a long story very short:
-Imperial is definded by nonsense numbers picked on random or invaded countries.
-metric is defined by the laws of physics.
end of story.
By the laws of physics and really determined Frenchmen back in the day lol, explains why the UK isnt fully metric im sure, some petty behavior against their neighbor across the channel
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 sticks of butter is usually in parts of a stick or ounces where 4 sticks is a pound, so I'm surprised the butter wasn't marked for you unless you were using spreadable butter.
@@jwb52z9Is there such a thing as non-spreadable butter?
@@mememaster695Those hotel butters. The ones that come hard as a rock in the little packets. 😂
@@mememaster695 they're referring to a block of butter as opposed to a tub of butter which usually has vegetable oil added to it to keep it spreadable even when fresh from the fridge
@@jwb52z9 In Denmark, the sticks of butter usually have marks on the wrapper to indicate roughly how much a “slice” from that stick will weigh. It’s in 25 gram intervals in the typical stick of 200 or 250 grams, if memory serves.
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.
Metric: Divide the speed of light by this one number and you got a metre. Wanna go smaller? Divide by 10. Go higher? Multiply by then. Convert? Just move the decimal point.
Imperial: Ok so we have this yard, which is like how long a backyard is or something. But obviously not nowadays because when i invented this unit all backyards were like kinda this long. So when you wanna know how long a yard is just think about yards from a few thousand years ago. But this doesnt quite measure the distance precisely, so if you wanna go smaller, i also invented this other unit called foot, which is the length of about a human foot. From a few thousand years ago. So if you wanna know how long a foot is just think about smelly feet from a few thousand years ago. But thats like still not precise enough, so i invented this new unit called Inch, which is about (holds fingers some distance apart infront of him) ye long. So whenever you wanna know how long an Inch is just hold your hands, adjust for your finger and hand size and you know how long an inch is. Now if you wanna go even more precise we also got a barleycorn, thou and twip, but no one remembers those for some reason so just use millimeters and nanometers. But thats metric which is dumb so instead were gonna divide the inches into 16ths because 16 is a cool number, and so now you can say like "10/16th of an inch". Ok cool. So because saying "I ate 32/16th of a banana" is not as intuitive as saying "I ate 2 bananas", you probably wanna convert those to our cool yards or whatever. Well, youre in unluck, because we didnt actually think that you wanted to change between units. So just remember the Numbers 12 and 3 and you can go up to foot and then yard. And then also remember some more numbers to go to bigger measurements we also made up, and then also all the numbers in the other systems for weight and volume. Thanks for reading, I hope youre not gonna use this to build rockets because we didnt think anyone would ever need precise measurements. Oh yeah, and because this system is so stupid we actually just sometime in the process tied all these Units to metres, so actually youre still secretely using the metric system.
Ahaha come to Portugal. When we are hit by heat waves, temperatures can shoot up to 46°C during summer.
Fun fact: The normal human body temperature is not 98.6 °F. It varies quite a significant amount even over the course of the day. The 98.6 °F figure not only implies a degree of precision finer than natural variation, it is also just what you get if you convert 37 °C (a nice, round number) to Fahrenheit.
And 37°C can already be seen as almost fever.
@@jgr7487Your temperature can be 37.,5 and you're just fine. I don't feel sick until i'm over 38
@@ykaloni have 36.9, i feel shit
You have to do a test to find YOUR normal temperature for YOUR thermometer.
The way you measure is probably going to change the temperature more than what your fever does.
Take a test measurement so you have something to compare too.
i was taught that 36,6°C is the standard average body temperature
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.
Exactly. It's about thinking in metric, not translating it.
I think language is a good analogy to system of measurement, we use both to communicate, quantify, and understand our world around us. The thing is as an American (which yes I am biased) I think some issues get pettifogged and conflated (largely for socio-political reasons) when it comes to imperial vs metric.
Namely: one is metric a better system for doing what the average person would need it for on a daily basis, and two does America use Metric?
The answer to the second is: as much as the world likes to rib Americans for it and as much as the US likes to keep up pretenses, when it comes to anything official, i.e. food labels, machine parts, tools, etc the US uses both. We tend to just default to either the imperial or metric unit that is easier to measure whatever in. For example small machine parts are all measured in metric until you get to about a few millimeters then we use both then as you get to about 17mm or so you start to get inches cause even in countries that use metric no one uses deci deca or hecto units.
Which takes us to the first question, would a complete switch to and insistence on using metric drastically improve the life of most Americans? The answer is no. Yes your cakes may not collapse after coming out of the oven due to more precision and accuracy of measuring ingredients, but most people don't cook on a laboratory level, even if you use precise spoons there is humidity, the issue of using a leveled spoonful etc, and if you cook with that level of precision or accuracy (professional cook) chances are you are acquainted with the most commonly used metric measurements too. The fact is metric was largely created by academia for academia and it benefits them most since their the ones launching rockets and machining mechanical parts which require high accuracy and precision.
Just like the average person doesn't realize that metric scales lie (they do btw gram is a unit of mass not weight the only way to know your mass in atoms is to know your volume first then do complex calculations based on how much percentage of your body is bone, fat, etc. but they don't, they measure your weight with a spring, which is a force so it should be measured in Newtons) the average person doesn't need high precision or accuracy much in daily life, you just wing it.
All of this is to say Metric is a good system without a doubt, Imperial is admittedly confusing but if your used to using it, why completely stop using it esp. if you can understand enough metric to get by, it kind of reminds me of how over here there is the insistence that everyone speak English exclusively, why? Even if English was a superior language to every other, (it is not) why? Why should people change their entire lives, cultures, point of reference to the world, and the way they think just so other people can have an easier time communicating, the way I see it, the world would be better off if everyone was multi-lingual / multi-measurement.
I am fully thinking in english,despite never living anywhere but my home country, because most of the internet operates in english. I can speak english better than my mother tongue, sometimes i even have to google a word i know in english because i dont know it in my own language
It's EXACTLY like learning a new language - except the new language only has one word, and you were born with that word tattood on your hands.
Not that complicated. My work demands that i switch countries every few years. If i happen to already know the language, i start thinking in it. Sometimes it's English, sometimes it's Italian, next time it's French. It's a thing of choice.
What comes to the temperature scale, we are not water but our environment is. And the zero point of the celsius scale is very intuitive to tell if the roads are at the morning wet or are they on ice.
Definitely agree with the butter part in cooking
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.
Kg and m are both si units (si is the measurement scientists use because it's more precise and strictly defined by different laws of nature. Meter is defined by the speed of light. Kilogram is defined by the Planck-constant (and meter and second). The only not Si Unit is Celsius but 0K is equal to -273C so its kind of ok
@@drehherd7394 Kelvin scale is the same as Celsius, but moved by 273,15 units
@@drehherd7394Celsius still converts easily you just need to add 273.15 for Kelvin, and I feel like that's fair, because it'd be weird to distinguish 278 degree weather from 281 degree weather 😂
The government switched in 1988, requiring any exchanges to be expressed in metric units. It's the people that will never change until there is a coordinated effort by government and industry to do so. The olde, arcane shit needs to be phased out.
@@jimm3205 exactly, just a consequence of not introducing it by tyranny like the rest of the not so free world
I think Johnny underestimates just how quickly culture can change. For the first half of my life you could put together a list of words that mean different things in the US and UK. Harry Potter introduced an entire generation of USAians to British slang. Similarly, manga used to be a niche of the comics niche - now I can go into any normal bookshop and find entire sections devoted to manga, larger bookshops having the manga subdivided in to sections that wouldn't be unfamiliar in Asian bookshops. Talking to people at work, manga, anime and cosplay are normalised to their children. None of this would have been believable at the end of the 20th century - all it might take is a product aimed at the international market to take off in the USA and the next generation might be normalised to the measures on that product.
Well, if they keep watching anime... they'll get plenty of metric exposure. Well, unless the localizers decide to actually localize that stuff properly. We all know they can't seem to localize the rest properly.
This. In my lifetime our country switched currency to euro with not an intuitive conversation rate and it was hard at first to realise what is expensive and what is not. It was also not intuitive how much money you save on a discount for example with percentages and new currency. I think for about half a year everyone was doing math in their heads or phones and then a year or so later it become absolutely the norm and at this point it feels like we always had euro
Eh, idk.. my parents in their 50/60s still don't intuitively understand metric measurements, they still talk in feet, ounces, miles, fahrenheit etc. despite Britain changing to the metric system years ago! I definitely think the metric system could take off in the USA with the new era of children who'd be taught it in schools, but I imagine many adult Americans, even young adults, would continue with imperial units for the rest of their life.
@@danh4698 For metric to be taught in school, at least some of the adults need to learn it. Well, if the teachers in the US can be considered adults (considering some of the stuff they post online).
My parents also didn't switch to metric... because they refuse to learn it. They say they can't picture 5km... but considering their estimates in miles to something are always wrong, I don't think it matters. And my dad would always measure twice, cut once, measure again, cut again, measure again... and go start another one because he now cut too much. And my mother's cook books are filled with recipe changes she spent a lot of time calculating to get half, quarter, double, and triple recipes. I think she feels offended to switch to an easier system now.
Thank you, well said. I'm 62 and really sick of waiting for the switch to happen. From Detroit it was easy to travel through Canada all the time. A lot of our ancestors migrated from Canada. A heck of a lot. Road signs were our introduction to the metric system. Not hard to follow Americans, get your head out of your backside and make the switch. I can say this to Americans because I am one, hearing this from other countries often is spoken so sharply it comes across as entitled AF, the very thing we're accused of . And yet your fellow countrymen have likely moved here long ago. We are all from someplace else except for our indigenous peoples. We are a country founded by migrating folks. Kindly, just think about that for a moment before you sling some judgement our way .
The real power of the metric system is the fact that one litre of water is one cubic decimeter and weighs one kilogram.
Instead of km/hr I think it would be more intuitive if we thought in meters per minute. 120 km/hr doesn't sound like much, until you translate it into 2000 meters per minute. That's when you realize you're going REALLY fast.
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.
Miles :P
Or 1760 yards, 🏃@@dougaltolan3017
You are pointing the main advantage (in my french opinion) of the metric system: it's the same system, with the same units (length, area, volume) declined by multiple of 10 (as we do with money every day, to appraise any value of anything, don't we?), that you use for any activity. The same unit, or multiple of 10 of this unit, to sew, to build furnitures or a house or a road, to cook or to transport beer, wine, oil ou gaz or whatever... As you always use the same patterns or methods, all ends up to become intuitive (sizes, quantites, etc) in the end, you don't have to calculate any real conversion, just move the decimal point, multiply or divide by 10, 100, and so on, you don't really need to know anything else than the name of multiples of 10 (deci, centi, milli... or deca, hecto, kilo... always the sames).
When I was a kid my teachers told us "When you guys are our age everyone will be using metric in the US. " It just never happened in everyday life. It did come in handy in my chemistry and physics classes.
I was in middle school, for those two years or so, that the US was committed to switching, and then...
@@CineSoar Come to think of it, I believe it was around what would be considered middle school in the Public School System. I went to Catholic School, so we were in the Upper School (Grades 5-8) at the time. Early to mid 80s. Also, I kind of remember the 1984 Olympics being talked about a lot and how we needed to be like the rest of the world .
Body temperatures are actually quite easy to grasp. Below 37 - normal temperature. 37 - 38 - mild fever, common colds usually come with this. 38 - 39 - moderate fever, particulary nasty case of common cold, might be flu. Better to consult a doctor. 39 - 40 - severe fever, you really need a doctor, there is a high chance it will only get worse without treatment. 40 and more - call the ER, your life might be in immediate danger. 42 - cellural damage due to protein denaturation, death imminent.
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.