Been working in HVAC since 1972 using Metric Units. When I realised that 1mm of Rain on 1 m2 of Roof measured as 1 Litre of Water. That Litre of Water weighs 1 kg. That convinced me very quickly 🇦🇺
The main thing is that is is not just meters vs. feet or Kilo vs. pounds or liters vs. gallons. 1 liter is 1 kilo of water. That freezes at 0C and boils at 100C. And the place it would take is 0.1x0.1x0.1 meter. (In Science you would need to add more info, like the purity of the water and the temperature and what not.) Try doing that in Imperial. A gallon of water is how heavy? What is the freezing and boiling point and how big would a square be in inches? And in feet? Or how many could you put next to each other to get to a foot? And a mile? It is also the reason in Europe recipes are often in weight. Because it is easy. If the recipe asks for 0.25 kg of flour and 0.5l of milk, what I do is set a bowl on on a scale and set it to 0. I then add 250 grams of flour. Set it the scale to 0. Add 500 gram of milk. And I can do that will all 5 ingredients. I do not need to make several cups dirty. I just put it all in the same bowl I am going to use. And if the recipe says 500ml or 50cl or 5dl or 0.5l, I still know what that is and know that is 0.5kg or 500 g.
I'm a professional cook and NEVER use an American recipe. How do I know what size their cups are or, for that matter, their teaspoons. They use volumes when they mean weights, and always define things different to imperial sizes. Exactly how much is 'a quarter of a US ton? So frustrating that any good cook goes to 'just improvise' mode.
A question to ask "Imperial" supporters is "How big is a gallon". I mean its a unit of volume, yes - so how big is it? How many cubic inches. How big would a gallon container be? I bet not 1 in 100 could answer.
The video elaborates on the current scientific definitions of the units but skips some other nice properties of the metric (SI) system: The meter was in 1799 originally defined as 1/10 000 000 the distance from the equator to the north pole, so the earth's circumference is approximately 40 000 000 m. A pendulum with a string length of 1 meter takes roughly 1 second to swing in one direction. 1 liter is 1 dm³ = 1000 cm³ = 10x10x10 cm. 1 liter of water has a mass of approximately 1 kg. 1 g of water has an amount of substance of approximately 1/18 mol (average water molecules consist of 18 nucleons). 1 candela is approximately the brightness of a household candle. A light source shining in all directions at 1 cd outputs 4π ≈ 12.57 lumens and illuminates an area at 1 m distance with 1 lux.
The video clearly states, that the second is no longer defined by a pendulum swinging. ALL of the SI units today, are defined by science. Also - write this behin your ear: ALL of the measurements that you use water to define, REQUIRES the water to be +4 degrees celsius. On that note, the imperial inch was initially defined by placing 3 barley corns lengthwise next to eachother and then from one end to the other, that was the inch.
@@eidodk What's your point? The second was never defined by a pendulum, but it's still true that a pendulum that takes 1 second for a swing has to have a string length of 0.9936 m which is close to 1m. And the gram was provisionally defined as the mass of one cubic centimeter of distilled water at 3.98 °C at an air pressure of 101.325 kPa. For household purposes the differences in density are small enough (4 % between 4°C and 99,9°C). Also that's why I wrote "approximately" multiple times.
@@cg909The French mathematician named Marin Mersenne would like a word. In fact the defining of a second from a pendulum was the whole birth of grandfather clocks.
@@eidodk Ok, fair. At least in the SI system it was never defined by a pendulum. There was an early proposal to use a seconds pendulum to formally define a second, but that was shot down.
He barely covered temperature, but this is where metric really beats imperial, because while °Celsius isn’t SI, °kelvin and °Celsius are the same with only the zero moved. To this point, 0°c is the freezing point of water and 100°c its boiling point.
@@JacobBax So you guys are just dumb. Your whole life you just learning stuff why not now ? Plus nothing really changes it's even way more easier to learn...
Already NASA, US Army and others use the metric system, and Celsius degrees instead of Fahrenheit. The U.S. military uses metric measurements extensively to ensure interoperability with allied forces, particularly NATO Standardization Agreements (STANAG). Ground forces have measured distances in "klicks", slang for kilometres, since 1918. Peace out.
scientifically, temperatures are measured in K and not C, but the difference is only a simple offset and no conversion factors are needed. and thus temperature differences can be given in either K or C because the difference is the same amount of units for both. and in daily life "freeze at 0, boil at 100" is very usefull when dealing with water, be it on the road (ice below 0) or when cooking.
@@akyhne True. But ONLY the money. Everything international in the USA has for ages already been based on the metric system. As you said, "They just don't know it".
He was German not Alabamian he worked with the no no Germens during WW2 and then was picked up by USA after the war. Well since the metric is unchangeable like the radiation in an enclosed set will always move the same speed thus we can always have the same nr to start from it does not matter the gravidity, the weather or any other interfering where the imperial needs metric to be accurate enough for science
Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun was a German and American aerospace engineer and space architect. He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, and the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany and later a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States. Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians entered the US after WW3. Peace out.
@@ItsCharlieVest and the rockets he build back then has been the V2 Weapon (the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile), which was mainly used to bomb Londong (GB) and Antwerp (Belgium).
Define 1 meter Cut the length in 10 equal parts Now you have 1 decimeter, dm Make a cube with sides = 1dm Now you have 1 litre Fill the cube with water Now you have one kilogram Put it in the freezer When there is ice mixed in the water you have 0 degrees Celsius Now put the cube on the stove When the water starts boiling you have 100 degrees Celsius.
Sweden converted from left-hand traffic to right-hand traffic overnight on September 3, 1967. How long will it take to teach US citizens the metric system? Could you switch to left-hand traffic?
Metric has two things going for it, and most people only know the one obvious thing: it makes more sense, as in you can find yourself on an island with nothing else, and still you can determine what 'zero degrees' is (water freezes), what '100 degrees' is (boiling water), what a meter is (the earth circumference divided by 10 million), what a kg is (10x10x10cm water) etc. You will be up and doing science in no time. Imperial on the other hand, has no connection at all with reality, and the different measurements are only connected haphazardly. Take for instance length. Length is in meter. There are dividers and multiplicators, like 1/1000 is a milli, 1000 is a kilo, etc. But in Imperial, its a complete joke. Length is given in what. Miles? Yards? Inches? Feet? What are their relations? 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 yard = 3 feet = 36 inches, 1 mile = 1,760 yards = 5,280 feet = 63,360 inches. Is this a joke? Has a clown defined your length measurements? But the most poignant improvement over imperial, comes in physics. Everything in physics is related, and condensed to the most simple formula. For instance, volume is defined as length times length times length, or length^3. Measure a box, put down the width, length and height in meters, multiply the numbers, and boom. You have the volume. Example: 0.250m x 1.200m x 4.350m = 1.305 m^3. Scientists found out correlations, formula's, between measurements, that will predict everything. Just look up 'SI derived Unit', and you will see them all. Lets do 'volume' in imperial, just to see how absurd it is. Volume, off course, is defined in gallon. Why, nobody knows. It is defined as 231 cubed inches. Why 231? nobody knows. Now take these three lengths, and calculate the volume: 1 mile 43 yards 3 feet 5 inches times 34 yards 2 feet 3 inches times 1 feet 4 inches. Remember in metric you could just multiply the lengths in meters? Now you would have to simplify the miles to yards, the yards to feet, the feet to inches. Multiply the lengths in inches. Then divide by 231 (because god knows why). And then you have the result in 'gallon'. Its insane. Force for example is in Newton: Weight (in kilogram) times length (in meter) divided by the time squared (in seconds). Just plug in the SI values, and boom, you get 'force'. Then joule is derived from force: accelerate a 1 kg mass at 1 m/s^2 through a distance of 1 m. Watt (power) is then derived as 1 joule per second. Etc. Everything in physics is connected like that. In the most concise and direct way. And its impossible to do in imperial. THAT is the biggest advantage of metric. You cant do decent physics: in imperial. They tried a bit: like with 'pressure is in pounds per square inch', but they just made it more messy, even harder to calculate. Because both weight and length are a complete mess in imperial. In metric it would be: pressure in Pascal is Newton divided by surface area. Aaaand you are done. Imperial did not even try with the 'harder' SI-units. If americans insist on using imperial as input and output, programmers will translate it all to metric as soon as it is input, and will only translate it back to imperial at the output. All internal calculations will be done: in metric. Always. Real science is ALWAYS done in metric. ALWAYS. I call imperial: 'CLOWN NUMBERS'. As in: "for goodness sake, stop using clown numbers, and start using metric" I have this theory that imperial is making phsyics so hard for americans, that most dont bother, give up, and this results in a large amount of americans not knowing the most basics of stem-science. Imperials: keeps the people unaware. Using imperial: makes you stupid.
Just to clarify - A gallon is 231 cubic inches because the gallon is defined in weight of water. 8lb in USA, 10lb in UK (Make sure you define which one!) So the size of that volume is 231cubic inches ( a box 6.something inches cube)
Reminds me of the temperature thing! Water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C ... < easy system! Meanwhile in the US: Water freezes at 32°F and boils at 212°F. So for your better understanding and calculation: FREEZE = (0°C × 9/5) + 32 = 32°F and BOIL = (100°C × 9/5) + 32 = 212°F ... you are welcome! :) *lol
As a qualified and experienced teacher math and physics I have two points. 1. Don't bother with the official definitions of meter and second (or any other fundamental unit). Nobody needs them in daily life. 2. The metric system is handy because it's so tightly connected to the decimal system.
Yes, the definition of the units is unnecessary for normal people. It's the same way for the definition of the meter, or the definition of the inch, those definition are only there for engineers and people who create the units to make sure an inch / meter in Europe is the same size as an inch / meter in Australia. Normal people need to know how to use the units, not define them.
@@2l84t You need someone to explain to you why a base-10 system is better than a mess of different conversions? Like, how many inches are there in 12 miles? Good luck for the conversion. That conversion would take less than 5 seconds with the metric system, asking how many millimeters there are in 12 km
There are 2 different miles. On land it is just over 1.6 kilometers. And at sea 1.8 is almost 1.9 kilometers per mile. Still paying attention at school and getting my boating license.
the nautical mile is a special case since it is used in connection with degrees and their fractions, eg when using sextants or other (nautical or aviation) calculations for distances around the globe. thus they still make sense when doing *these specific calculations.* to get rid of them and still have easy factors, circles no longer could be measured in degrees, minutes and seconds, and thus until then you need to either stick with nautical miles or use SI units with more complicated conversion factors from degrees. (saying this as a european who likes metric and SI) btw: afaik there also are no nautical feet or nautical inches :-) but only decimal fractions of nautical miles.
@@Anson_AKBone could make that small step for mankind, and switch from degrees, minutes and seconds for angles to gon, with a right angle being 100 gon. But for some unknown reason, even all the countries using the metric system still use degrees for angles.
@@PotsdamSenior The reason 360 degrees is much easier to use, is that it can be divided into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12 parts (and a few more) without getting decimals, where the gon could not. 400 gon for a full circle can be split in less fractions without decimals, the most important not into 3 or 6, the basis of the triangle.
@@PotsdamSenior lots of things are related and partially depend on one another, and to not cause chaos, they would have to be adjusted in some meaningfull way that improves the current situation and doesn't cause more chaos than we already have. for both time and angles, we already use the 60-system (or a mixture of 6 and 10) with 6*10 minutes per hour and 6*10 seconds per minute, and 6*60 is 360 which is used for a full circle (btw: did you ever use a circle instrument to put 6 equidistant marks on a circle of 360 degrees?). changing angles from 90 to 100 for a right angle imho would have no major advantages (at least i heard of none), but make a circle of 400 instead of 360 or maybe 100 or 1000 (to have "metric" numbers for the entire thing) which still would be inconsistent with the 60-system of its parts. or should minutes and seconds also be changed to be 100 gonminutes per hour (or gondegree), 100 gonseconds per gonminute, and 10 or 100 newhours per day ? eg 1 day = 10 newhours (instead of 24 hours) = 1000 (10*100) gonminutes (instead of 1440 minutes), and 100000 (10*100*100) gonseconds (instead of 86400 seconds) ... changing what a second is would also have effects on many other SI units, calculations and formulas, thus create even more chaos, or cause us to end up with days that are no longer some integer number of hours long, with the time of noon and midnight changing on every day and night cycle, thus also creating havoc on weeks, months, years, etc. and it's physically impossible for us to change the length of days and years, anyway. and everything that americans claim to be a problem for them if they switch from miles to kilometers would apply worldwide to every country that then would use the new "kilometers (in the usa probably still miles, lol) per newhour" for speeds, and all other units that are partially defined by seconds. when calculating anything with circles, PI or 2*PI can be used for doing the math, and the angles (which are no SI units anyway) are needed only for having a better intuition of angles in daily life, than having a fraction of PI as right angles.
The USA , Canada and the UK slowly inch their way to the metric system. Imperial: 22 yards in a chain. 66 feet in a chain. 12 inches in a foot. 80 chains in a mile. 8 furlongs in a mile. 100 links in a chain. 40 rods in a furlong. 1760 yards in a mile. All quite self explanatory right? Now for metric. 10 hectometres in a kilometre. 10 decametres in a hectometre. 10 metres in a decametre. 10 decimetres in a metre. 10 centimetres in a decimetre. 10 millimetres in a centimetre. Phew!
Farmers in my country sometimes use old measurements like Bunder (also known as Bonder, Bonnarium or Bonnier) or Morgen, the last means morning, it is a measurement of how much land can be plowed in a morning with a team of two oxen, which is about 10,000m2. In Dutch there is also the measurement of Dagwand, which is 3,300m2 and is a piece of land a farmer can plow in a day (Dag is Dutch and means day) with a team of one ox. In English they have the same, it is called an acre, which is about 4,000m2, in Germany it is called a Tagewerk which is about 3,000m2 and in France it is called a Jour, which is about 3,300m2. So they’re all kind of the same and yet all are different. It’s good that we have the metric system.
I love those old measurements because they give you a glimpse into the everyday world and thinking of people. It makes perfect sense for a farmer that he has 9 Dagwand / Tagwerke of land, because that's a clear statement of how many days of dry weather it'll take to have it all plowed if he works alone / with one neighbor helping / etc. And that weird, weird zero point of the Fahrenheit scale - lowest temperature you can manufacture using water, ice and ammonium chloride - could just make sense because ice itself hasn't always the same temperature; it's just always colder than the freezing point. But thank goodness nobody insists of using those as measurements today because _nah, metric is to complicated with all those 'times ten' and 'divide by ten' conversions..._
1 meter = 10 decimeter/100 centimeter/1,000 millimeter 1 kilometer = 10 hectometer/100 decameter/1,000 meter Just give in by now and accept the metric system and the fact our football is superior to your hand-egg-ball.
I guess part of the American/Anglo incomprehension about the metric system comes from a linguistic difficulty. If you speak a Romance language, you can't have any doubt about how many millimeters are there in metre (milli=mille=a thousand) and so on...
That does not seem to cause an unsurmountable difficulty for the speakers of literally hundreds of non-romance-language speakers in the world. It's a simple thing you learn once.
11:41 fun fact about the video, is that imperial is so useless, that they even made an error with the number of bolts for the railing forgetting the two in the beginning. They should order two more.
Of course metric system is better I grew up with it can't do anything with miles inches and other body parts. I have a few kilometers to France, by the way, the country where the metric system was born, where I don't have to convert like the rest of Europe. I can show approximately one meter with my arms 1 cm between two fingers intuitively knows how far 1 km is and it is simply better for calculating and also more accurate.
Well, I'm British and the Imperial system was ours before the Americans adopted it. We converted to the metric system as well as the Americans. The metric system was invented by France but was based on the size of the Earth, so everyone agreed to use it. If you're a scientist or engineer, you use the metric system. I was taught the metric system at school, but my three year older brother learned the Imperial system. I can use both, but in the UK, we still talk in miles for distances, stones and pounds for weight in general use. In the US the scientists etc are all expected to use the metric system because of the conversion problems. I use Celsius, which is a bugger when you have an Amercian cooking recipe in Fahrenheit (doable though).
cooking is easy when you have measurements in gram and can even use calibratable scales (add one ingredient, zero the scales and add the next one), in contrast to adding all the different cups, spoons, etc. and when converting them, you also have to take different compactness (relative densities) into account (eg liquids vs wheat vs rice vs noodles) ...
Yeah, I'll have 2x cups of flour for my cake please? + a Farhenheit of butter and 3 Gallons of sugar. Whereas in Eng-ger-land we'd have a demi-hectare of butter, 3 fathoms of Farhenheit + 18 knots of sugar.
I wouldn't say "adopted" so much as "inherited" , after all, some of the first European inhabitants of North America were Brits (famously escaping an oppressive king who didn't allowed them to outlaw music, theater, make-up and gifts at Xmas ...), and they just kept using the measurement system they were used to. Fahrenheit to Celsius is my biggest issue, too. I have a rough idea of how many grams / millimeters per ounce, km per miles, yard or foot per meter ... But the Fahrenheit scale? Like, zero degrees is the coldest temperature you could manufacture in 1714, and 96°F is the temperature of a 'healthy' human being? If it wasn't for online converters, I'd probably ignore all Fahrenheit statements. They tend to be around 180°C anyways.
@@Julia-lk8jn I'm glad somebody else finds the Fahrenheit scale confusing. Zero Fahrenheit was the measure of the coldest things of the time, frozen brine; zero to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Then 180 degrees (from the degrees in a triangle, I guess) between the freezing and boiling point of water. So, water boils at 180 + 32 = 212 degrees Fahrenheit. I suppose you have to be an American who uses it all the time to be comfortable with it.
@RasMosi I was trying to be diplomatic, but yeah I can't really think of any reasons 🤣. Only situations I can think of would be when interacting with American clients and suppliers, but that's an issue of their own making.
Hello Charlie. I 1975 I was an engineer wit British Telecomm. I had just moved into a planning office. We did short term planning in telephone exchanges. One thing I had to do was to increase the equipment if the telephony traffic increased. The job I was to plan was to increase the equipment in a suburb of Newport, South Wales. This was analogue equipment, all cabling and electromechanical equipment. I had to arrange for some cable to be run in. I got the chart, measured the length of 80 pair cable I needed with my foot rule. Wrote out my first estimate which would allow stores to be drawn and time booked to the job. I ordered 50 yards, (150 ft) of cable , spent all day on it, presented it to the boss for signing and he sent it back. All lengths of cable had to be in metres, the chart about 40 year old was imperial. I had to rewrite the estimate My dad was a shop keeper and he sold fruit & vegetables. This was long before calculators. If a customer wanted 4 bananas, we weighed them in pounds & ounces. We hadn’t yet had decimal coinage, there were 240 pennies in a pound. Try working out 1lb 4oz at 15 pence per pound. Now with decimal coinage and metric weights its so much easier, its in 10’s not 16 oz to a pound!
Yes, metric is better. I get that someone using imperial dont believe it is cuz its hard to readjust. But if you started from scratch, knowing neither, metric is infinitely better. Both in usefulness and logic.
If everything around them was changed to metric, the people in the US would learn it and get an intuition for it. For some people of the first generations it might never completely change their mind. But for most it's just a matter of getting used to it. Just like when the Euro was introduced, some old people still sometimes do conversion to their previous currency, but most people moved on.
Yes, it will take one, maybe 2 generations to move on, but at last we would have the whole globe using the same units everywhere. No more conversions issues!
Everything is 10 in metric and everything is connected, literally you have a kilo water as a cubic decimeter. It has to be 4°C though. Metric is just simple, and obviously it works.
To answer your question about deaths in the Apollo program: the crew of apollo burned inside their capsule because the oxygen levels were so high (about 100 % IIRC) that a spark caused a fire which immediately consumed everything inside. That's why modern spacecraft only have about 0.3 bar of pure oxygen, which is enough for human to breathe normally (as about 78 percent of our normal air is made of useless nitrogen) but not enough for a fire to burn. And I can confirm that Wernher von Braun, the mastermind behind Saturn V, was not really a native from Alabama. A bit more to the east - across the pont - and then a bit further east until you are in a region formerly known as Posen. :D
There's several videos online and texts, that the US doesn't use Imperial at all. It's US customary units, it's a mix of Imperial, metric and something that the US did long ago.
On the Moonlanding the Problem was not to teach the Astronauts. They were totally able tu use metric. The Problem was that they were used tu Imperial from birth and in most parts of their lifes. So they could not use Metric inuitively. For Mission security it was just bettrer to "waste" computational time and power for conversion and let the Astronauts use where they are intuitively better. You can imagine what that means for International Missions today? There are always people with the risk of falling back to the wrong System in a stress situation.
Seems like the imperial system today is just a conversion layer on top of the metric system. The problem is that in the course of a human life you build an intuitive feel for distances and sizes, so changing it mess with your intuitive understanding of how far you need to walk. Maybe transition can be done by always printing both on sign and documents for a while?
In USA you use the metric system, because the lenght of a feed is exact defined in m. And the m is also exakt defined. So you use the metric system, but you don't know it.
For us who use the metric system the imperial is just nonsese, once i was working in a company that had a project with a USA company, they were providing the design and blueprints, and our work was to produce the final product, I was on the marketing department of the company, but i had contact with the production department, for them it was hell doing the convertions, and the machinery was calibrated in the metric system, so in the first prototype there were a lot of errors by milimeters, cause we don't work on fractions we use exact numbers, it cost 4 prototypes to finally figure it out the exact numbers, it was a waste of time and money.
It is often said that it would cost too much for the US to change to metric. I wonder how much it costs to stay with imperial... And it wouldn't have to be an abrupt change, you could start using kg instead of pounds first, after a year or two starting to use grams instead of ounces, etc
Dunno about "better". The major difference is: NO conversion factors in the metric system. Just move the decimal point the appropriate quantity of digits to left/right, because everything is based on factors of 10. After all, we have 10 fingers, right? BUT! That can be difficult for those who have no idea that a dollar contains 4 quarters (because they have no idea that "quart(er)" means 1/4). Or that "cent" means 100.
My biggest bugbear is when the Continentals use Litres/100km , while in the UK we use Miles/gallon when calculating vehicle road range. ( don't even mention that the US gallon is SMALLER than the Imperial UK gallon - a rabbit hole best avoided , lol )
Miles/gallon is not linear. The problem is most people don't know this and use it as a economy / efficiency tool, including the government. Litres/100km is much better at showing the economy / efficiency relationship between two vehicles.
It's all about conventions, i.e. "agreeing in order to avoid confusion". If you decide to start to call black white and white black as from tomorrow, because of some whacky reason, and you order white shoes without telling the seller about your "new"definition, what will you get? Also, for example, considering weight based on whether a substance is a liquid or a solid is absolutely insane. There are red, yellow and green apples, but in the end, they are all apples. A word of advice: ordering your daily dose from your dealer, do it in grams, not ounces.
The "measurement" of importance based on the number of overrun countries actually existed. It is basically how mighty the land was viewed. He only put it in the video as a joke though because it is a very outdated form of "measuring". Wernher von Braun, best known for his involvement of the development of the V2 rocket, build in one of the KZs, was a German. His "german friends from gap year" are german NS officers. Apollo 13 exploded on April 13 1970 after a oxygen tank ruptered and caused a massive explosion in the rocket. The crew came back safe to earth a few hours later.
agree to everything, but the time was a bit off : the explosion happened 56 hours after the start while they were still on their way to the moon. thus they had to continue, swing around the moon, and then return 88 hours later (almost 3.7 difficult and dramatic days, and not only a few easy hours)
Once i traveled to Australia (Bendigo, Victoria) for a engineering visit. Funny to hear things like kiloliters, instead of cubic meter. One thing they did right was the mm tape measure. Ours still use centimeter and i would really like to have the mm ones. But i manage 🤣.
For older people it can be a problem. In Europe we converted the Euro into our old currency for years even in Germany where it was simple with nearly 2 to 1. The prices tags showed both for a few years. To change the imperial thinking would need a mutch longer time. I think it would need as long as all people lived their whole life with it are gone.
As a Dutch crafter i really don't like the imperial. We also have both on rulers. But i just don't understand why it has to be that difficult with all the quarts, halfs etc. But also the cooking measurement 🤯😱. 😂😂 but i think someone growing up with imperial will have it with metric.😂😂😂❤
The last part of the video is just the BEST "estimates" with the precision we have at this time as human beings of the constants of the universe, wich are used to define the metric system. Is really not the most important part of the video unless you are really into physics or maths. The key of the video, is that the metric system follow the rule of tenths for convertions between it's units. So much easy than the imperial arbitrary system.
Well, that's funny.. When chatting with UK friends from belgium I always recalculated kilos, meters to miles and oz... 🤔. They never said a thing. Eye opening they use the metric system. I must be stupid 😂. They could have mentioned it.. Making things a lot easier.
We're a bit screwed up over here in Blighty mate. For example, on the roads it's all imperial. In the shops, and with money, it's metric. I'm 55 and was taught both imperial and metric at school in the 70s. Depending on which teacher we got 🙂. In my normal life I always use metric though. Makes far more sense to me. Miles per hour and yards on the road is more of a cultural thing I think. Stuck in our ways really.
@@taffeylewis that's confusing. You must be all good at math 😉. A dumb question.. What has the metric system to do with money. Pound sterling is the currency... But what is metric about it? The name is the same indeed. I thought it had nothing to do with eachother. More a coincidence. I'm more confused now. Lol
@@Followyourpassions there didnt used to be 100 pennies to a pound, there used to be 240 pennies. 12 pennies made a shilling, 20 shillings to an old pound. now there are 100 pennies to a pound. decimalisation rather than metrication for currency but still similar.
I do wonder if it will ever be possible to get all Americans to use the metric instead due to many Americans mindset in the matter. Just the other day I ended up in a discussion online with one that thought that people should convert Celsius to Fahrenheit when writing temperature online. I asked why 96% of the Earths population should do that for the 4 % that use F and if it shouldn't be the other way around instead. As a note, I have no issue to quickly converting it into C by just searching it. But I'm a bit mean and notoriously use the metric system, even if the question is written with the imperial, I'm doing my part of easing people into it. 😉
someone once said that if drug barons would be more powerfull and a few more americans became drug addicts, metric would very quickly be adopted everywhere ...
Imperial system has always looked super confusing, I would have made so many extra mistakes if I was using it. Metric system works really well and not really that hard to learn.
The main reason USA doesn't use metric system is because Americans are very stubborn when someone tells them to change their ways. So anytime there was the initiative to switch to metric there were people basicly protesting agaist it so politicians in order to keep support of their voters backed up from this idea.
A fractional system actually makes more sense for eg wood working, which is why we in Sweden, having used metric for 100 years or so, still have inches marked on the yard sticks, and refer to the thickness of planks and lengths of nails in inches
Every German woodworker would probably disagree, given that inches are only to be found in one place here: The measuring tool is still called an "inch stick" (Zollstock) despite only having mm and cm.
Metric is easier because we count in a decimal system and conversion between units uses the same decimal system Imperial counts in a decimal system but does not convert that way. it adds complexity which makes it worse. That said, time both is and isn't metric. Time's smallest unit, the second is metric, but minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years are not. We still have relics of measurement invented long before metric that we all use and don't think twice about. Computers are also not fully metric. They count in a binary system, not a decimal one. 1000 bytes are not equal to 1 kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes are not 1 megabyte. Despite this, these are globally accepted units. The most important part is that we all use the same system. Systems that are easely spread globally are those that have as little complexity as possible and/or we can visualize easely. Why do we still use days months and years? Because 1 day = 1 rotation of our planet, 1 month is roughly 1 moon rotation and 1 year is 1 rotation around the sun. It is not diffucult to understand because we can observe it happening around us. Why did we end up with a decimal system? Probably because we all have 10 fingers. Everyone has hands to visualize 10. We can easely teach a decimal system to a human because of it. Because we all can learn the decimal system everyone can get a quick grasp of a decimal conversion between units which is why the french idea of metric caught on in the rest of the world. Simple to understand ideas catch on fast, Complex ideas do not.
The video from Real Engineering didn't really explain why the definitions of units are important. It all boils down to the fact that we keep getting better and better at measuring things. For example, the kilogram was defined by a specific artifact held in a vault in France - meaning: whatever this artifact mass was, it was ALWAYS EXACTLY 1 kg and ALL measurements of mass in kg in the whole world treated this as a common base (if your potatoes mass was 2 kg it meant they are 2x heavier than this, specific artifact). And then our measuring techniques improved and it turned out this artifact's mass wasn't really constant - it shifted by micrograms/nanograms based on temperature, humidity, air pressure, location on Earth were the measurement was performed etc. Even when they tried to control for all the variables, they found that repeating the measurement after some time still gives a slightly different result. While this is not an issue for everyday measurements regular people do, this was a big problem for science - in some fields extreme precision is needed and those micro/nano differences in unit definitions were simply unacceptable and caused a lot of confusion. Sure, scientists could agree on an updated definition, but then measurement techniques would get better again and the problem would reappear (and then again and again) - it would never be truly solved that way. So they flipped this thing around - they said "this scientific constant's value is EXACTLY ". Scientific constants use units as well, so in the end it's a matter of picking the right set of constants and transform the equations to get stuff like "1 kg = ....", "1 second = ...." etc.. The whole point is that scientific constants stay constant. So now if we invent better measuring techniques again, the constants stay EXACTLY the same, no new definition is required, everyone still agrees on what the definition is - no more confusion, even in the areas of science requiring the most extreme precision. The problem is solved once and for all. That's why basic imperial units are now defined in metric ("1 foot = 0.3048 meters" etc.) - so the imperial system can also take advantage of these definitions of basic metric units, which allows it to be used in very precise areas as well and it doesn't need further updates to its definitions.
Don't teach the people to how to use the metric system... Just step over! Like GB did. Like Australia did. And like many other countries did. I also don't really follow his story about the definition of a second and how that is logical, but I learned at school that 1 meter (100 cm) by 1 meter by 1 meter of water weights 1000 kilograms. This is at room temperature 21°C (Celsius). 0°C is when water starts freezing and 100°C is when it boils (at a certain hight). In the metric system many standards are linked in a natural way. I am not a scientist so I am not really the right person to explain this. Anybody? But this bit is what I miss in this video. The metric system is way more logical than this video explains. And that is why it is way more stupid that the USA isn't using this allover. But whatever... I must also say that it is kind of annoying that many American tourists in Europe expect that we calculate what they order back into imperial standards. How are we supposed to know? We never use it. And if Americans use the metric system quite regularely (as they say in the video) than you calculate! Just saying...
actually we tried the imperial system in the netherlands because we wanted to follow MURICA, then we realized it was garbo and ditched it for the metric system.
..it is better! He forgot just to mention that that long number at the end, is speed of light, and what plank is, but this gave an idea, even if he complicated for new users.. Water is the essence of metric system.. 1 centimeter (10 mm), is a drop of water width in a non absorbant surface.... ..1 cubic milimeter of water , weights 1 gramm.. ..water frezes at 0ºC elsius, and boils at 100 ºC .. ..is a better way to explain simplicity of metric system..
By the way, the whole of America has Metric, only the USA doesn't quite have it yet - you always confuse the USA with the continent of America, you alone are not America, as a little food for thought.
The whole point of units is, that you can use whatever units you want. If your name happens to be Joe, you may define the length of your leg as „1 Joe“ and nobody will stop you from using that. However, you might have a difficult time to communicate your masuerments given in „Joes“ to other poeple. That‘s why stadardized units were invented - because it makes communication easier. The main advantage of metrc units, by the way, isn‘t the absolute value of 1 metre or 1 kilogram, but the fact that their super- and sub-units are related by powers of 10 and that this matches with our number system that is also based on (powers of) 10. Babylonians (whose number system was based on 60) or Celts (whose number system was based on 20), might have found the metric slightly inconvenient 😉
For the imperial guys, we metric guys don’t have trouble with inches. You dig now how powerful metric is? Monitors, drums, you name it, if there’s a standard in inches, we don’t need to think. You guys can’t integrate metric in imperial, because imperial is too complicated. But inches standards in the metric world are and were never a problem. That’s how superior metric is.
I love watching you soak up new language! "There's two types of countries, those that use metric and those that put a man on the moon" - Yep, Myanmar, famous for it's successful lunar program. The whole "but it doesn't make sense to me, I don't have an idea what a kilometer is => we can't possibly use it" makes my eyes roll back, and not in a good way. If something making sense was a prerequisite to using it, nobody would use English (you know, that language that's been described as "five languages in a trench coat" ) ! You start using it, and then it slowly starts to 'make sense' .
If interested, here are two really good videos explaining the differences and the pros of the metric system for science as well as every day life. METRIC SYSTEM I ua-cam.com/video/zkuYuRn6Vls/v-deo.html METRIC SYSTEM II ua-cam.com/video/Z8WoTOix4c4/v-deo.html
Yes we have Km/h so when we drive 100 km/h you wil drive 160 mls/h so to keep that in line you have to drive i think about 80 mls/h and like why are there countries where they drive at te left and also use mls/h?? And yes metric is just in mm and not in 7 and a quater or something. And why are there diverence temperature anouncments while they are all the same? C/F America like England are to stuburn to use Metric!
I says this as a person raised on the Metric system. I don't think Americans should feel forced to give up the Imperial system just because everyone else uses something different - its part of the American identity, culture and language. However, I firmly believe that the US education system should do a lot more to educate students in using the metric system so that they are better prepared when they enter the real world. Other countries have no problem in educating their students in speaking English to a high level of proficiency - The US should have no problem in teaching another "language" (the language of the universe, lol) to its students
They are not British imperial units, they are US custom units. The English and Americans can't even completely agree on the same dimensions. The English pint is smaller than the American pint and even a European shot glass is larger.
I still remember the horrors we went through as students at university when we had to use an American book in physics that was entirely in imperial measures 😱 constantly converting the measures led to a lot of mistakes, I can see why that Mars lander crashed … How do you want to do science with these arbitrary measurements that are based on the length of this once king’s foot and his arm, so totally unrelated? How do you say 1 picometer in imperial? Like this: 1 pm = 3.9370078740157E-11 inch. And is that then a British inch or an American one? As stated in an earlier comment, we still use old medieval names for measures like ounce, pounds and acres, but nowadays they’re just short for 100 grams, 500 grams and 10 000 square meters. And as stated in the video, America has already adopted the metric system; not only by defining the imperial measurements by metric ones but you use it every day: the dollar is metric …
"whats`s the most puzzling thing about the USA?" Otto von Bismarck : "from hundreds of native languages, they chose the language of the former colonial power". And their "imperial" system.
"...what is it about the Imperial System that just has America grasping along for dear life?..." Money. Seriously, that's what it comes down to. Switching to metric would cost a lot of money, and the longer it's delayed, the more money it'll cost. Every textbook needs to be updated, every road sign (probably twice), every car, ever label on every product. When other countries switched over, it cost a lot to do, and took _years,_ and _even now_ many countries that are supposedly fully metric use a mix of units. British people still order a pint down at the pub, frequently talk about how many miles something is away, and so on. You get the same in Canada. But you asked if metric is superior. It is. Flat out. In fact, the video you watched didn't even mention several ways that metric was already invading the USA. Ever watch a medical drama and they are deciding how much of a drug to inject someone with? "Get me 14 CCs of thorazine!" What's a CC? It's a 'cubic centimeter'. The medical establishment uses metric, in the USA, _right now._ They just don't spell it out, so most people just thing 'CC' is some strange, drug measuring unit. Most drug busts are measured in kilograms, and you can buy a 2 liter of soda at the market. What the video said is also true. If you've ever worked in metric (no, I don't mean picking the right wrench for a particular nut, I mean designing and building things purely in metric), you'd see how easy it is. At the end there, the video got a bit confusing, because it showed that metric still has magic numbers. Why is a meter defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of second? Where does that number 299,792,458 _come from?_ The answer is that we already had a meter defined elsewhere (by two marks on a bar). That number was chosen to make the answer as close to a meter as possible without resorting to decimal places. The same is true with the other magic numbers in the system. The units of measure they represent already existed, and so magic numbers like that were selected in order to make the eventual answer match up with what we already had in order to keep the units the same instead of making a whole new system. What's _crucial_ here, though, is how much of that you need to remember in order to _use_ the metric system. ... None. You don't need to know _any_ of it, because it doesn't _matter._ The only time it's _at all_ important is if you're calibrating a new measuring device (or checking/recalibrating an old one) and, for whatever reason, don't have an already calibrated device to check it against. That is, if you want to make a meter stick and you don't _have_ a meter stick around to make sure they're the same, _then_ you need that weird number. But you _absolutely don't_ need it, ever, to _use_ meters. Compare that with the various units of measure in Imperial. In order to _use_ inches, feet, yards, and miles, you _do_ have to know the magic numbers. You have to know there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1760 yards in a mile, because _without_ that knowledge, you can't use them. You also need to know there are 16 ounces in a pound, and 2240 pounds in a ton. Unless it's a fluid, then you need to know there's 20 _fluid_ ounces in a pint, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon. So to use the metric system, you need to keep track of ounces vs fluid ounces, and the numbers 12, 3, 1760, 16, 2240, 20, 2, and 4, and _correctly_ associate them with each unit of measure with _no indication_ in the unit itself what the appropriate number to associate with it is, and two units _with the same name_ that measure different things (even excluding pounds-weight vs pounds-force). And it's not like any of those units are never used, and almost all are even _frequently_ used (the pint less so, but it's still out there). You need to keep track of _eight_ separate magic numbers with no help, pure rote memorization. So how many numbers do you need to use metric? Three. 10, 100, 1000. No one measures anything in decimeters or dekameters or hectometers. 10 mm in a cm, 100 cm in a m, 1000 m in a km. No one uses anything other than grams and kilograms, so 1000 there. And milliliters vs liters. Plus, in all cases the units have different names entirely _and_ the conversion is _part of_ the name of the unit, making it transferable from one unit to another. If you know there's 1000 MILLImeters in a meter, it's not hard to work out there's 1000 MILLIliters in a liter, it's right in the name of each sub unit (that is, different measures of the same thing). Add on top of this the ease of conversion between units, just shifting decimal places, and it gets even clearer why metric is superior. How often have you been tired, knowing something has totaled to 213 ounces, and tried to convert that to pounds to see what you should do with it? You can't do that conversion in your head, _especially_ if you're a little off. But 213 milliliters to liters? You can do that one in your head, even when you're tired or feeling off. Mistakes don't _entirely_ go away (you might shift the decimal by two spots instead of three), but they are _drastically_ reduced. Of course, if it were up to me to unilaterally decide, I wouldn't promote either system. I'd start over, right from numbers. I'd invent a new numbering system, with new symbols, in base 16. Why base 16? It's binary, and given our reliance on computers today, being able to read 3E and A84 _directly_ instead of having to try to convert them to their decimal equivalents of 62 and 2692 respectively would be _enormously_ helpful. Then I'd do the same thing the weights and measures people did, base it on things about the universe that don't ever change, but I'd change the magic numbers to something that ends in a bunch of zeros, probably all of them starting with 1, as well. So instead of a meter being the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds, the base unit of length would be the distance light travels in 10,000,000 of a second, with that number 10,000,000 being hexadecimal, meaning it works out to 1/268,435,456 of a second (10,000,000 in hexadecimal = 268,435,456 in decimal). The base unit would be slightly shorter than a meter (it'd be 89.5%, roughly, of its length), but the magic numbers would (kinda) be gone, certainly be easier to _remember_ (which is easier to remember, 10,000,000 or 299,792,458), and still all work. Now we have a system based on science, to be the language of not just _physical_ science but also _computer_ science as well. And, as it should be obvious from the above, I'd use different names for all the units of measure so they wouldn't be confused at all, either with each other _or_ with the units we use now. The one snag with all the above is... time. Right now, there's 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. Using the above, there's no way the time will work out that neatly. If the base unit of time is called a fempt, and we define it as the transition frequency in Hz of that Cesium 133 atom set to 100,000,000 (in hexadecimal), a 'second' would be about twice the duration it is now, but not precisely. Make a dekafempt be 10 of those, and a hectofempt be 100, kilofempt be 1000, and so on. A dekafempt would be about 21 seconds, a hektofempt would be 2 minutes 34 seconds, a kilofempt would be 35 minutes 40 seconds, and there'd be 40 kilofempts 373.8 fempts in a solar day. I suspect dekafempt and hektofempt would fall out of use, and leave us with fempt and kilofempt. Time would be metered then, though, and I think we'd all just get used to understanding that when the time is 12,000 fempt (which would translate to pretty close to 7 AM), it's time to get up (for... y'know, lots of people... with this 'normal life' thing I keep hearing about), and that the day ends at a weird time of 40,374 fempt. However the one _advantage_ to this going forward is that we'd _expect_ time to be weird like that... which is _very useful_ if we ever colonize other planets. After all, a 'day' being 24 hours is unique to Earth and, moreover, Earth's solar day isn't even constant. It's slowing down. We have to add a second every so often to our clocks (the idea of doing this was put in place in 1972, and we've added extra seconds 27 times since then). If we all got used to the idea that a day could be redefined in terms of fempts, then when we colonized Mars we wouldn't be trying to express the 'clean' system from Earth into a broken 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds. That messes with our expectations because we're _expecting_ a clean measure right now. But if we were _expecting_ something unruly like 40,374 fempts (which sometimes gets shortened as the Earth's rotation slows), then it being 41,484 on Mars I think would be easier for us to handle and adapt to. You could still have a UTC based on the number of fempts since some arbitrary starting point (probably October 10 at 10:10:10 from the old clock in year 10, so the starting point, under the old system, would be 10:10:10 10/10/10) for a form of absolute measurement anywhere in the universe. Make 'weeks' (using some new name) 10 days, ignore months, and years would be however long that was to get around the star the planet is orbiting (there'd be 36.5 'weeks' in a year on Earth). All these weird numbers being specific to a planet prepares us for living among the stars where planets won't all have the same values for those things anyway _and_ even the planet's we're _on_ are changing over time.
We did fractions at school, watching you i had to stop and wonder why. It dawned on me why it was just for numbers. Juring WW2 a famous F-up was in Africa, Brits were going to fight and travel accros the desert, the French used metric. So they put l's in instead of the gallons the Brits asked for, whoops so we ran out of fuel BUT this is part of why the SAS was created. Yep he takes the Piss alot.
Yeah it can get a bit whacky, but I also enjoyed physics in school and play Kerbal space program. And as a Metric native it's fine :). If I would have to nail down why I don't like Imperial: Its just a pain in the ass to do calculation and measurements with. I've worked years as a Systems Developer in the Measurement and Production industry. Converting within the Imperial is total nonsense, no structure and when I had to convert from imperial to metric so I could use SI units drove me mad. I've hunted bugs because of that for 2 weeks. And fractions introduce floating point errors because of technical limitations of the computer so one has to be aware when working with high precision stuff. And Imperial is nothing but fractions after calculations...
At least in cooking metric is better! Is it is much more precise to use a scale with grams and kilo's than to use cups and spoons. More precise and quicker to note down than eg two one third of a cup🙄
@@dellinger71 i mean you can use micrometers instead of milimiters and increase the precision so i don't know what you mean. I think metric is superior in every aspect
@@gorkavelasco Imperial dimensions can also be calculated extremely small, it is just much more complex and the potential for error is considerably higher.
@@dellinger71 you are proving my point. Overcomplicating measurements leads to failure and imprecision so metric wins again. Get rid of imperial because at this point you are holding to it just for EGO not facts
Been working in HVAC since 1972 using Metric Units.
When I realised that 1mm of Rain on 1 m2 of Roof measured as 1 Litre of Water.
That Litre of Water weighs 1 kg.
That convinced me very quickly 🇦🇺
The main thing is that is is not just meters vs. feet or Kilo vs. pounds or liters vs. gallons. 1 liter is 1 kilo of water. That freezes at 0C and boils at 100C. And the place it would take is 0.1x0.1x0.1 meter. (In Science you would need to add more info, like the purity of the water and the temperature and what not.) Try doing that in Imperial. A gallon of water is how heavy? What is the freezing and boiling point and how big would a square be in inches? And in feet? Or how many could you put next to each other to get to a foot? And a mile?
It is also the reason in Europe recipes are often in weight. Because it is easy. If the recipe asks for 0.25 kg of flour and 0.5l of milk, what I do is set a bowl on on a scale and set it to 0. I then add 250 grams of flour. Set it the scale to 0. Add 500 gram of milk. And I can do that will all 5 ingredients. I do not need to make several cups dirty. I just put it all in the same bowl I am going to use. And if the recipe says 500ml or 50cl or 5dl or 0.5l, I still know what that is and know that is 0.5kg or 500 g.
I feel the need to expand on this. 1 litre is 1 kilo of water at room temperature since that actually makes a difference.
I'm a professional cook and NEVER use an American recipe. How do I know what size their cups are or, for that matter, their teaspoons. They use volumes when they mean weights, and always define things different to imperial sizes. Exactly how much is 'a quarter of a US ton? So frustrating that any good cook goes to 'just improvise' mode.
A question to ask "Imperial" supporters is "How big is a gallon". I mean its a unit of volume, yes - so how big is it? How many cubic inches. How big would a gallon container be? I bet not 1 in 100 could answer.
Not having to buy a second set of tools for an obsolete system of measurement. Bonus right there.
The Alabama accent thing was sarcasm.
He was a scientist during WW2 working for the angry Austrian mustache model.
🤣
The video elaborates on the current scientific definitions of the units but skips some other nice properties of the metric (SI) system:
The meter was in 1799 originally defined as 1/10 000 000 the distance from the equator to the north pole, so the earth's circumference is approximately 40 000 000 m.
A pendulum with a string length of 1 meter takes roughly 1 second to swing in one direction.
1 liter is 1 dm³ = 1000 cm³ = 10x10x10 cm.
1 liter of water has a mass of approximately 1 kg.
1 g of water has an amount of substance of approximately 1/18 mol (average water molecules consist of 18 nucleons).
1 candela is approximately the brightness of a household candle. A light source shining in all directions at 1 cd outputs 4π ≈ 12.57 lumens and illuminates an area at 1 m distance with 1 lux.
The video clearly states, that the second is no longer defined by a pendulum swinging. ALL of the SI units today, are defined by science. Also - write this behin your ear: ALL of the measurements that you use water to define, REQUIRES the water to be +4 degrees celsius.
On that note, the imperial inch was initially defined by placing 3 barley corns lengthwise next to eachother and then from one end to the other, that was the inch.
@@eidodk What's your point? The second was never defined by a pendulum, but it's still true that a pendulum that takes 1 second for a swing has to have a string length of 0.9936 m which is close to 1m. And the gram was provisionally defined as the mass of one cubic centimeter of distilled water at 3.98 °C at an air pressure of 101.325 kPa. For household purposes the differences in density are small enough (4 % between 4°C and 99,9°C). Also that's why I wrote "approximately" multiple times.
@@cg909The French mathematician named Marin Mersenne would like a word. In fact the defining of a second from a pendulum was the whole birth of grandfather clocks.
@@eidodk Oh shit, name drop.
@@eidodk Ok, fair. At least in the SI system it was never defined by a pendulum. There was an early proposal to use a seconds pendulum to formally define a second, but that was shot down.
He barely covered temperature, but this is where metric really beats imperial, because while °Celsius isn’t SI, °kelvin and °Celsius are the same with only the zero moved. To this point, 0°c is the freezing point of water and 100°c its boiling point.
Metric system is the easiest to work with because of its logic. It's simple as that, no other reasons needed. Imperial is just too complicated.
Not when your whole life is in imperial, and you can teach them in metric, but training them is an other story.
Yeah it still is, how many inches in a mile?
@@JacobBax In Metric going from one size to the next is all about the factor 10. It doesn't get easier than that.
Imperial is an outdated mess that has no place in the modern world, that's what it is
@@JacobBax So you guys are just dumb. Your whole life you just learning stuff why not now ? Plus nothing really changes it's even way more easier to learn...
Already NASA, US Army and others use the metric system, and Celsius degrees instead of Fahrenheit. The U.S. military uses metric measurements extensively to ensure interoperability with allied forces, particularly NATO Standardization Agreements (STANAG). Ground forces have measured distances in "klicks", slang for kilometres, since 1918. Peace out.
Americans uses the metric every day. They just don't know it.
Their money is in metric.
scientifically, temperatures are measured in K and not C, but the difference is only a simple offset and no conversion factors are needed. and thus temperature differences can be given in either K or C because the difference is the same amount of units for both.
and in daily life "freeze at 0, boil at 100" is very usefull when dealing with water, be it on the road (ice below 0) or when cooking.
@@akyhne True. But ONLY the money. Everything international in the USA has for ages already been based on the metric system. As you said, "They just don't know it".
@@akyhne And their guns, and the units for storage in their computers, phones, consoles, etc
Americans use the metric system already, especially for their gun ammunition, where the 9mm is pretty popular as far as I know.
Yes, and in camera equipment, lenses and what not.
Ask your local drug dealer for an oz. Of coco and he will tell you nah we working with grams
He was German not Alabamian he worked with the no no Germens during WW2 and then was picked up by USA after the war. Well since the metric is unchangeable like the radiation in an enclosed set will always move the same speed thus we can always have the same nr to start from it does not matter the gravidity, the weather or any other interfering where the imperial needs metric to be accurate enough for science
Ok thanks I wasn't sure lol
yeah go to jail for war crime or come work for the usa on our rocket program and live like a free man hard choice....
@@ItsCharlieVest
Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun was a German and American aerospace engineer and space architect. He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, and the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany and later a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States. Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians entered the US after WW3. Peace out.
NEIN, NEIN, NEIN,... 😂❤
@@ItsCharlieVest and the rockets he build back then has been the V2 Weapon (the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile), which was mainly used to bomb Londong (GB) and Antwerp (Belgium).
Define 1 meter
Cut the length in 10 equal parts
Now you have 1 decimeter, dm
Make a cube with sides = 1dm
Now you have 1 litre
Fill the cube with water
Now you have one kilogram
Put it in the freezer
When there is ice mixed in the water you have 0 degrees Celsius
Now put the cube on the stove
When the water starts boiling you have 100 degrees Celsius.
Rolling down the road in my 5.0 ... liter.
Administer 5cc (cubic centimeter) of medicine now!
or get some grams of partypowder from your local dealer🙂
Sweden converted from left-hand traffic to right-hand traffic overnight on September 3, 1967. How long will it take to teach US citizens the metric system? Could you switch to left-hand traffic?
Metric has two things going for it, and most people only know the one obvious thing: it makes more sense, as in you can find yourself on an island with nothing else, and still you can determine what 'zero degrees' is (water freezes), what '100 degrees' is (boiling water), what a meter is (the earth circumference divided by 10 million), what a kg is (10x10x10cm water) etc. You will be up and doing science in no time. Imperial on the other hand, has no connection at all with reality, and the different measurements are only connected haphazardly. Take for instance length. Length is in meter. There are dividers and multiplicators, like 1/1000 is a milli, 1000 is a kilo, etc. But in Imperial, its a complete joke. Length is given in what. Miles? Yards? Inches? Feet? What are their relations? 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 yard = 3 feet = 36 inches, 1 mile = 1,760 yards = 5,280 feet = 63,360 inches. Is this a joke? Has a clown defined your length measurements?
But the most poignant improvement over imperial, comes in physics. Everything in physics is related, and condensed to the most simple formula. For instance, volume is defined as length times length times length, or length^3. Measure a box, put down the width, length and height in meters, multiply the numbers, and boom. You have the volume. Example: 0.250m x 1.200m x 4.350m = 1.305 m^3. Scientists found out correlations, formula's, between measurements, that will predict everything. Just look up 'SI derived Unit', and you will see them all.
Lets do 'volume' in imperial, just to see how absurd it is. Volume, off course, is defined in gallon. Why, nobody knows. It is defined as 231 cubed inches. Why 231? nobody knows.
Now take these three lengths, and calculate the volume: 1 mile 43 yards 3 feet 5 inches times 34 yards 2 feet 3 inches times 1 feet 4 inches. Remember in metric you could just multiply the lengths in meters? Now you would have to simplify the miles to yards, the yards to feet, the feet to inches. Multiply the lengths in inches. Then divide by 231 (because god knows why). And then you have the result in 'gallon'. Its insane.
Force for example is in Newton: Weight (in kilogram) times length (in meter) divided by the time squared (in seconds). Just plug in the SI values, and boom, you get 'force'.
Then joule is derived from force: accelerate a 1 kg mass at 1 m/s^2 through a distance of 1 m.
Watt (power) is then derived as 1 joule per second. Etc.
Everything in physics is connected like that. In the most concise and direct way. And its impossible to do in imperial. THAT is the biggest advantage of metric. You cant do decent physics: in imperial. They tried a bit: like with 'pressure is in pounds per square inch', but they just made it more messy, even harder to calculate. Because both weight and length are a complete mess in imperial. In metric it would be: pressure in Pascal is Newton divided by surface area. Aaaand you are done. Imperial did not even try with the 'harder' SI-units.
If americans insist on using imperial as input and output, programmers will translate it all to metric as soon as it is input, and will only translate it back to imperial at the output. All internal calculations will be done: in metric. Always. Real science is ALWAYS done in metric. ALWAYS.
I call imperial: 'CLOWN NUMBERS'. As in: "for goodness sake, stop using clown numbers, and start using metric"
I have this theory that imperial is making phsyics so hard for americans, that most dont bother, give up, and this results in a large amount of americans not knowing the most basics of stem-science. Imperials: keeps the people unaware. Using imperial: makes you stupid.
Just to clarify - A gallon is 231 cubic inches because the gallon is defined in weight of water. 8lb in USA, 10lb in UK (Make sure you define which one!) So the size of that volume is 231cubic inches ( a box 6.something inches cube)
Reminds me of the temperature thing! Water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C ... < easy system! Meanwhile in the US: Water freezes at 32°F and boils at 212°F.
So for your better understanding and calculation: FREEZE = (0°C × 9/5) + 32 = 32°F and BOIL = (100°C × 9/5) + 32 = 212°F ... you are welcome! :) *lol
As a qualified and experienced teacher math and physics I have two points.
1. Don't bother with the official definitions of meter and second (or any other fundamental unit). Nobody needs them in daily life.
2. The metric system is handy because it's so tightly connected to the decimal system.
Yes, the definition of the units is unnecessary for normal people. It's the same way for the definition of the meter, or the definition of the inch, those definition are only there for engineers and people who create the units to make sure an inch / meter in Europe is the same size as an inch / meter in Australia.
Normal people need to know how to use the units, not define them.
Don't bother to explain ? You're over paid .
Explain what?
@@2l84t You need someone to explain to you why a base-10 system is better than a mess of different conversions?
Like, how many inches are there in 12 miles? Good luck for the conversion. That conversion would take less than 5 seconds with the metric system, asking how many millimeters there are in 12 km
There are 2 different miles. On land it is just over 1.6 kilometers. And at sea 1.8 is almost 1.9 kilometers per mile. Still paying attention at school and getting my boating license.
the nautical mile is a special case since it is used in connection with degrees and their fractions, eg when using sextants or other (nautical or aviation) calculations for distances around the globe. thus they still make sense when doing *these specific calculations.*
to get rid of them and still have easy factors, circles no longer could be measured in degrees, minutes and seconds, and thus until then you need to either stick with nautical miles or use SI units with more complicated conversion factors from degrees.
(saying this as a european who likes metric and SI)
btw: afaik there also are no nautical feet or nautical inches :-) but only decimal fractions of nautical miles.
@@Anson_AKBone could make that small step for mankind, and switch from degrees, minutes and seconds for angles to gon, with a right angle being 100 gon. But for some unknown reason, even all the countries using the metric system still use degrees for angles.
@@PotsdamSenior The reason 360 degrees is much easier to use, is that it can be divided into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12 parts (and a few more) without getting decimals, where the gon could not. 400 gon for a full circle can be split in less fractions without decimals, the most important not into 3 or 6, the basis of the triangle.
There is also the Scandinavian mile of 10km
@@PotsdamSenior lots of things are related and partially depend on one another, and to not cause chaos, they would have to be adjusted in some meaningfull way that improves the current situation and doesn't cause more chaos than we already have. for both time and angles, we already use the 60-system (or a mixture of 6 and 10) with 6*10 minutes per hour and 6*10 seconds per minute, and 6*60 is 360 which is used for a full circle (btw: did you ever use a circle instrument to put 6 equidistant marks on a circle of 360 degrees?). changing angles from 90 to 100 for a right angle imho would have no major advantages (at least i heard of none), but make a circle of 400 instead of 360 or maybe 100 or 1000 (to have "metric" numbers for the entire thing) which still would be inconsistent with the 60-system of its parts.
or should minutes and seconds also be changed to be 100 gonminutes per hour (or gondegree), 100 gonseconds per gonminute, and 10 or 100 newhours per day ? eg 1 day = 10 newhours (instead of 24 hours) = 1000 (10*100) gonminutes (instead of 1440 minutes), and 100000 (10*100*100) gonseconds (instead of 86400 seconds) ...
changing what a second is would also have effects on many other SI units, calculations and formulas, thus create even more chaos, or cause us to end up with days that are no longer some integer number of hours long, with the time of noon and midnight changing on every day and night cycle, thus also creating havoc on weeks, months, years, etc. and it's physically impossible for us to change the length of days and years, anyway. and everything that americans claim to be a problem for them if they switch from miles to kilometers would apply worldwide to every country that then would use the new "kilometers (in the usa probably still miles, lol) per newhour" for speeds, and all other units that are partially defined by seconds.
when calculating anything with circles, PI or 2*PI can be used for doing the math, and the angles (which are no SI units anyway) are needed only for having a better intuition of angles in daily life, than having a fraction of PI as right angles.
The USA , Canada and the UK slowly inch their way to the metric system.
Imperial: 22 yards in a chain. 66 feet in a chain. 12 inches in a foot. 80 chains in a mile. 8 furlongs in a mile. 100 links in a chain. 40 rods in a furlong. 1760 yards in a mile. All quite self explanatory right? Now for metric. 10 hectometres in a kilometre. 10 decametres in a hectometre. 10 metres in a decametre. 10 decimetres in a metre. 10 centimetres in a decimetre. 10 millimetres in a centimetre. Phew!
Kinda ironic how the "land of the freedom" uses a system stablished by an EMPIRE.
THE BRITISH EMPIRE of all of them.
Farmers in my country sometimes use old measurements like Bunder (also known as Bonder, Bonnarium or Bonnier) or Morgen, the last means morning, it is a measurement of how much land can be plowed in a morning with a team of two oxen, which is about 10,000m2. In Dutch there is also the measurement of Dagwand, which is 3,300m2 and is a piece of land a farmer can plow in a day (Dag is Dutch and means day) with a team of one ox. In English they have the same, it is called an acre, which is about 4,000m2, in Germany it is called a Tagewerk which is about 3,000m2 and in France it is called a Jour, which is about 3,300m2. So they’re all kind of the same and yet all are different. It’s good that we have the metric system.
I love those old measurements because they give you a glimpse into the everyday world and thinking of people. It makes perfect sense for a farmer that he has 9 Dagwand / Tagwerke of land, because that's a clear statement of how many days of dry weather it'll take to have it all plowed if he works alone / with one neighbor helping / etc.
And that weird, weird zero point of the Fahrenheit scale - lowest temperature you can manufacture using water, ice and ammonium chloride - could just make sense because ice itself hasn't always the same temperature; it's just always colder than the freezing point.
But thank goodness nobody insists of using those as measurements today because _nah, metric is to complicated with all those 'times ten' and 'divide by ten' conversions..._
Wut. You need help.
1 meter = 10 decimeter/100 centimeter/1,000 millimeter
1 kilometer = 10 hectometer/100 decameter/1,000 meter
Just give in by now and accept the metric system and the fact our football is superior to your hand-egg-ball.
I guess part of the American/Anglo incomprehension about the metric system comes from a linguistic difficulty. If you speak a Romance language, you can't have any doubt about how many millimeters are there in metre (milli=mille=a thousand) and so on...
That does not seem to cause an unsurmountable difficulty for the speakers of literally hundreds of non-romance-language speakers in the world. It's a simple thing you learn once.
To be fair with the plane fuel conversion issue, it happened the first day (or the first days) the change to metric was introduced.
11:41 fun fact about the video, is that imperial is so useless, that they even made an error with the number of bolts for the railing forgetting the two in the beginning. They should order two more.
Yup, that also bothered me the first time I saw the original. ^^
Love that shirt man!
Of course metric system is better I grew up with it can't do anything with miles inches and other body parts.
I have a few kilometers to France, by the way, the country where the metric system was born, where I don't have to convert like the rest of Europe.
I can show approximately one meter with my arms 1 cm between two fingers intuitively knows how far 1 km is and it is simply better for calculating and also more accurate.
Well, I'm British and the Imperial system was ours before the Americans adopted it. We converted to the metric system as well as the Americans. The metric system was invented by France but was based on the size of the Earth, so everyone agreed to use it. If you're a scientist or engineer, you use the metric system. I was taught the metric system at school, but my three year older brother learned the Imperial system. I can use both, but in the UK, we still talk in miles for distances, stones and pounds for weight in general use. In the US the scientists etc are all expected to use the metric system because of the conversion problems. I use Celsius, which is a bugger when you have an Amercian cooking recipe in Fahrenheit (doable though).
cooking is easy when you have measurements in gram and can even use calibratable scales (add one ingredient, zero the scales and add the next one), in contrast to adding all the different cups, spoons, etc. and when converting them, you also have to take different compactness (relative densities) into account (eg liquids vs wheat vs rice vs noodles) ...
Yeah, I'll have 2x cups of flour for my cake please? + a Farhenheit of butter and 3 Gallons of sugar.
Whereas in Eng-ger-land we'd have a demi-hectare of butter, 3 fathoms of Farhenheit + 18 knots of sugar.
I just have a thermometer that converts c to f but it still makes no sense for me
I wouldn't say "adopted" so much as "inherited" , after all, some of the first European inhabitants of North America were Brits (famously escaping an oppressive king who didn't allowed them to outlaw music, theater, make-up and gifts at Xmas ...), and they just kept using the measurement system they were used to.
Fahrenheit to Celsius is my biggest issue, too. I have a rough idea of how many grams / millimeters per ounce, km per miles, yard or foot per meter ...
But the Fahrenheit scale? Like, zero degrees is the coldest temperature you could manufacture in 1714, and 96°F is the temperature of a 'healthy' human being?
If it wasn't for online converters, I'd probably ignore all Fahrenheit statements. They tend to be around 180°C anyways.
@@Julia-lk8jn
I'm glad somebody else finds the Fahrenheit scale confusing.
Zero Fahrenheit was the measure of the coldest things of the time, frozen brine; zero to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Then 180 degrees (from the degrees in a triangle, I guess) between the freezing and boiling point of water. So, water boils at 180 + 32 = 212 degrees Fahrenheit.
I suppose you have to be an American who uses it all the time to be comfortable with it.
that dude is von braun. and he is the same dude that made the v1 and v2 rockets for the nazis...
Trying learn imperial, all i get is massive headache😂
I grew up with metric so maybe im bias, but it seems so much more logical
As an Engineer, there's no comparison. Metric is better than Imperial in almost every regard.
@RasMosi I was trying to be diplomatic, but yeah I can't really think of any reasons 🤣. Only situations I can think of would be when interacting with American clients and suppliers, but that's an issue of their own making.
Hello Charlie. I 1975 I was an engineer wit British Telecomm. I had just moved into a planning office. We did short term planning in telephone exchanges. One thing I had to do was to increase the equipment if the telephony traffic increased. The job I was to plan was to increase the equipment in a suburb of Newport, South Wales. This was analogue equipment, all cabling and electromechanical equipment. I had to arrange for some cable to be run in. I got the chart, measured the length of 80 pair cable I needed with my foot rule. Wrote out my first estimate which would allow stores to be drawn and time booked to the job. I ordered 50 yards, (150 ft) of cable , spent all day on it, presented it to the boss for signing and he sent it back. All lengths of cable had to be in metres, the chart about 40 year old was imperial. I had to rewrite the estimate
My dad was a shop keeper and he sold fruit & vegetables. This was long before calculators. If a customer wanted 4 bananas, we weighed them in pounds & ounces. We hadn’t yet had decimal coinage, there were 240 pennies in a pound. Try working out 1lb 4oz at 15 pence per pound. Now with decimal coinage and metric weights its so much easier, its in 10’s not 16 oz to a pound!
Yes, metric is better.
I get that someone using imperial dont believe it is cuz its hard to readjust.
But if you started from scratch, knowing neither, metric is infinitely better.
Both in usefulness and logic.
If everything around them was changed to metric, the people in the US would learn it and get an intuition for it. For some people of the first generations it might never completely change their mind. But for most it's just a matter of getting used to it. Just like when the Euro was introduced, some old people still sometimes do conversion to their previous currency, but most people moved on.
Yes, it will take one, maybe 2 generations to move on, but at last we would have the whole globe using the same units everywhere. No more conversions issues!
Everything is 10 in metric and everything is connected, literally you have a kilo water as a cubic decimeter. It has to be 4°C though.
Metric is just simple, and obviously it works.
I’m all for metric but I grew up with metric
To answer your question about deaths in the Apollo program: the crew of apollo burned inside their capsule because the oxygen levels were so high (about 100 % IIRC) that a spark caused a fire which immediately consumed everything inside. That's why modern spacecraft only have about 0.3 bar of pure oxygen, which is enough for human to breathe normally (as about 78 percent of our normal air is made of useless nitrogen) but not enough for a fire to burn.
And I can confirm that Wernher von Braun, the mastermind behind Saturn V, was not really a native from Alabama. A bit more to the east - across the pont - and then a bit further east until you are in a region formerly known as Posen. :D
There's several videos online and texts, that the US doesn't use Imperial at all. It's US customary units, it's a mix of Imperial, metric and something that the US did long ago.
Look up Gimli Glider for the story about them tanking not enough fuel in the airplane.
On the Moonlanding the Problem was not to teach the Astronauts. They were totally able tu use metric. The Problem was that they were used tu Imperial from birth and in most parts of their lifes. So they could not use Metric inuitively. For Mission security it was just bettrer to "waste" computational time and power for conversion and let the Astronauts use where they are intuitively better. You can imagine what that means for International Missions today? There are always people with the risk of falling back to the wrong System in a stress situation.
Seems like the imperial system today is just a conversion layer on top of the metric system. The problem is that in the course of a human life you build an intuitive feel for distances and sizes, so changing it mess with your intuitive understanding of how far you need to walk. Maybe transition can be done by always printing both on sign and documents for a while?
I live in South America and here they use whatever they like at the moment it seems 😂
In USA you use the metric system, because the lenght of a feed is exact defined in m. And the m is also exakt defined. So you use the metric system, but you don't know it.
For us who use the metric system the imperial is just nonsese, once i was working in a company that had a project with a USA company, they were providing the design and blueprints, and our work was to produce the final product, I was on the marketing department of the company, but i had contact with the production department, for them it was hell doing the convertions, and the machinery was calibrated in the metric system, so in the first prototype there were a lot of errors by milimeters, cause we don't work on fractions we use exact numbers, it cost 4 prototypes to finally figure it out the exact numbers, it was a waste of time and money.
There is a video "Metric Moment" by Jay Godfrey that explains simply the relationship between distance, volume, liquid measurement, weight and mass.
It is often said that it would cost too much for the US to change to metric. I wonder how much it costs to stay with imperial...
And it wouldn't have to be an abrupt change, you could start using kg instead of pounds first, after a year or two starting to use grams instead of ounces, etc
Dunno about "better". The major difference is: NO conversion factors in the metric system. Just move the decimal point the appropriate quantity of digits to left/right, because everything is based on factors of 10. After all, we have 10 fingers, right?
BUT! That can be difficult for those who have no idea that a dollar contains 4 quarters (because they have no idea that "quart(er)" means 1/4). Or that "cent" means 100.
@@MrDjTilo "Better" is so subjective a word, that I leave to others its (mis)use. But I certainly find the metric system SO MUCH EASIER to use... 🙂
My biggest bugbear is when the Continentals use Litres/100km , while in the UK we use Miles/gallon when calculating vehicle road range. ( don't even mention that the US gallon is SMALLER than the Imperial UK gallon - a rabbit hole best avoided , lol )
Just fully switch to the metric system, instead of trying to keep some old units in place ;)
Miles/gallon is not linear. The problem is most people don't know this and use it as a economy / efficiency tool, including the government. Litres/100km is much better at showing the economy / efficiency relationship between two vehicles.
It's all about conventions, i.e. "agreeing in order to avoid confusion". If you decide to start to call black white and white black as from tomorrow, because of some whacky reason, and you order white shoes without telling the seller about your "new"definition, what will you get? Also, for example, considering weight based on whether a substance is a liquid or a solid is absolutely insane. There are red, yellow and green apples, but in the end, they are all apples. A word of advice: ordering your daily dose from your dealer, do it in grams, not ounces.
There is actually a movie on that Air Canada flight.
The "measurement" of importance based on the number of overrun countries actually existed. It is basically how mighty the land was viewed. He only put it in the video as a joke though because it is a very outdated form of "measuring".
Wernher von Braun, best known for his involvement of the development of the V2 rocket, build in one of the KZs, was a German. His "german friends from gap year" are german NS officers.
Apollo 13 exploded on April 13 1970 after a oxygen tank ruptered and caused a massive explosion in the rocket. The crew came back safe to earth a few hours later.
agree to everything, but the time was a bit off : the explosion happened 56 hours after the start while they were still on their way to the moon. thus they had to continue, swing around the moon, and then return 88 hours later (almost 3.7 difficult and dramatic days, and not only a few easy hours)
@@Anson_AKB You are right, a few many hours in pure distress.
In Australia we changed from the imperial to the metric system in the 1960s, it wasn’t as confusing or difficult as it may seem
Once i traveled to Australia (Bendigo, Victoria) for a engineering visit. Funny to hear things like kiloliters, instead of cubic meter. One thing they did right was the mm tape measure. Ours still use centimeter and i would really like to have the mm ones. But i manage 🤣.
For older people it can be a problem. In Europe we converted the Euro into our old currency for years even in Germany where it was simple with nearly 2 to 1. The prices tags showed both for a few years.
To change the imperial thinking would need a mutch longer time. I think it would need as long as all people lived their whole life with it are gone.
The currency changed to a metric system in 1966 but distances and weights weren't metricated until 71.
As a Dutch crafter i really don't like the imperial. We also have both on rulers. But i just don't understand why it has to be that difficult with all the quarts, halfs etc. But also the cooking measurement 🤯😱. 😂😂 but i think someone growing up with imperial will have it with metric.😂😂😂❤
Cause we as Dutch used it as well in past. Still some old, books, recipes use it. Even elderly Dutch use lbs and oz instead of grams.
The last part of the video is just the BEST "estimates" with the precision we have at this time as human beings of the constants of the universe, wich are used to define the metric system. Is really not the most important part of the video unless you are really into physics or maths. The key of the video, is that the metric system follow the rule of tenths for convertions between it's units. So much easy than the imperial arbitrary system.
Well, that's funny.. When chatting with UK friends from belgium I always recalculated kilos, meters to miles and oz... 🤔. They never said a thing. Eye opening they use the metric system. I must be stupid 😂. They could have mentioned it.. Making things a lot easier.
We're a bit screwed up over here in Blighty mate. For example, on the roads it's all imperial. In the shops, and with money, it's metric. I'm 55 and was taught both imperial and metric at school in the 70s. Depending on which teacher we got 🙂. In my normal life I always use metric though. Makes far more sense to me. Miles per hour and yards on the road is more of a cultural thing I think. Stuck in our ways really.
@@taffeylewis that's confusing. You must be all good at math 😉. A dumb question.. What has the metric system to do with money. Pound sterling is the currency... But what is metric about it? The name is the same indeed. I thought it had nothing to do with eachother. More a coincidence. I'm more confused now. Lol
@@Followyourpassions It's in base-10, so there's 100p in a £. Before we used to have weird denominations like shillings and half-pence.
@@Followyourpassions there didnt used to be 100 pennies to a pound, there used to be 240 pennies. 12 pennies made a shilling, 20 shillings to an old pound. now there are 100 pennies to a pound. decimalisation rather than metrication for currency but still similar.
I do wonder if it will ever be possible to get all Americans to use the metric instead due to many Americans mindset in the matter. Just the other day I ended up in a discussion online with one that thought that people should convert Celsius to Fahrenheit when writing temperature online. I asked why 96% of the Earths population should do that for the 4 % that use F and if it shouldn't be the other way around instead.
As a note, I have no issue to quickly converting it into C by just searching it.
But I'm a bit mean and notoriously use the metric system, even if the question is written with the imperial, I'm doing my part of easing people into it. 😉
someone once said that if drug barons would be more powerfull and a few more americans became drug addicts, metric would very quickly be adopted everywhere ...
Imperial system has always looked super confusing, I would have made so many extra mistakes if I was using it. Metric system works really well and not really that hard to learn.
And still all the world of cars uses horsepower over kilowatt. That includes Europe.
The conversion is 1.36 hp per KW, by the way.
Metric is generally "easier". Generally, everyone's got 10x fingers + 10x toes - so our actors and sports stars can manage it.
why would you want to spend an hour on calculations when you can do it in fifteen minutes... so yes, the video says it all
The main reason USA doesn't use metric system is because Americans are very stubborn when someone tells them to change their ways. So anytime there was the initiative to switch to metric there were people basicly protesting agaist it so politicians in order to keep support of their voters backed up from this idea.
A fractional system actually makes more sense for eg wood working, which is why we in Sweden, having used metric for 100 years or so, still have inches marked on the yard sticks, and refer to the thickness of planks and lengths of nails in inches
Every German woodworker would probably disagree, given that inches are only to be found in one place here: The measuring tool is still called an "inch stick" (Zollstock) despite only having mm and cm.
3:20 yup, that Rocket 🚀 was the V2 from Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun … more to learn in Wikipedia 😂
Your Military and Police use Metric
Metric is easier because we count in a decimal system and conversion between units uses the same decimal system
Imperial counts in a decimal system but does not convert that way. it adds complexity which makes it worse.
That said, time both is and isn't metric. Time's smallest unit, the second is metric, but minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years are not.
We still have relics of measurement invented long before metric that we all use and don't think twice about.
Computers are also not fully metric. They count in a binary system, not a decimal one.
1000 bytes are not equal to 1 kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes are not 1 megabyte. Despite this, these are globally accepted units.
The most important part is that we all use the same system. Systems that are easely spread globally are those that have as little complexity as possible and/or we can visualize easely.
Why do we still use days months and years? Because 1 day = 1 rotation of our planet, 1 month is roughly 1 moon rotation and 1 year is 1 rotation around the sun. It is not diffucult to understand because we can observe it happening around us.
Why did we end up with a decimal system? Probably because we all have 10 fingers. Everyone has hands to visualize 10. We can easely teach a decimal system to a human because of it.
Because we all can learn the decimal system everyone can get a quick grasp of a decimal conversion between units which is why the french idea of metric caught on in the rest of the world.
Simple to understand ideas catch on fast, Complex ideas do not.
The video from Real Engineering didn't really explain why the definitions of units are important. It all boils down to the fact that we keep getting better and better at measuring things. For example, the kilogram was defined by a specific artifact held in a vault in France - meaning: whatever this artifact mass was, it was ALWAYS EXACTLY 1 kg and ALL measurements of mass in kg in the whole world treated this as a common base (if your potatoes mass was 2 kg it meant they are 2x heavier than this, specific artifact).
And then our measuring techniques improved and it turned out this artifact's mass wasn't really constant - it shifted by micrograms/nanograms based on temperature, humidity, air pressure, location on Earth were the measurement was performed etc. Even when they tried to control for all the variables, they found that repeating the measurement after some time still gives a slightly different result. While this is not an issue for everyday measurements regular people do, this was a big problem for science - in some fields extreme precision is needed and those micro/nano differences in unit definitions were simply unacceptable and caused a lot of confusion. Sure, scientists could agree on an updated definition, but then measurement techniques would get better again and the problem would reappear (and then again and again) - it would never be truly solved that way.
So they flipped this thing around - they said "this scientific constant's value is EXACTLY ". Scientific constants use units as well, so in the end it's a matter of picking the right set of constants and transform the equations to get stuff like "1 kg = ....", "1 second = ...." etc.. The whole point is that scientific constants stay constant. So now if we invent better measuring techniques again, the constants stay EXACTLY the same, no new definition is required, everyone still agrees on what the definition is - no more confusion, even in the areas of science requiring the most extreme precision. The problem is solved once and for all.
That's why basic imperial units are now defined in metric ("1 foot = 0.3048 meters" etc.) - so the imperial system can also take advantage of these definitions of basic metric units, which allows it to be used in very precise areas as well and it doesn't need further updates to its definitions.
Don't teach the people to how to use the metric system... Just step over! Like GB did. Like Australia did. And like many other countries did.
I also don't really follow his story about the definition of a second and how that is logical, but I learned at school that 1 meter (100 cm) by 1 meter by 1 meter of water weights 1000 kilograms. This is at room temperature 21°C (Celsius). 0°C is when water starts freezing and 100°C is when it boils (at a certain hight). In the metric system many standards are linked in a natural way. I am not a scientist so I am not really the right person to explain this. Anybody? But this bit is what I miss in this video. The metric system is way more logical than this video explains. And that is why it is way more stupid that the USA isn't using this allover. But whatever...
I must also say that it is kind of annoying that many American tourists in Europe expect that we calculate what they order back into imperial standards. How are we supposed to know? We never use it. And if Americans use the metric system quite regularely (as they say in the video) than you calculate! Just saying...
actually we tried the imperial system in the netherlands because we wanted to follow MURICA, then we realized it was garbo and ditched it for the metric system.
..it is better! He forgot just to mention that that long number at the end, is speed of light, and what plank is, but this gave an idea, even if he complicated for new users..
Water is the essence of metric system.. 1 centimeter (10 mm), is a drop of water width in a non absorbant surface.... ..1 cubic milimeter of water , weights 1 gramm.. ..water frezes at 0ºC elsius, and boils at 100 ºC .. ..is a better way to explain simplicity of metric system..
By the way, the whole of America has Metric, only the USA doesn't quite have it yet - you always confuse the USA with the continent of America, you alone are not America, as a little food for thought.
make a cube that can exactly hold 3 gallons of a liquid.
😂 this video is killing it
Good question actually wonder indeed how many people died because of this dispute
The whole point of units is, that you can use whatever units you want. If your name happens to be Joe, you may define the length of your leg as „1 Joe“ and nobody will stop you from using that. However, you might have a difficult time to communicate your masuerments given in „Joes“ to other poeple. That‘s why stadardized units were invented - because it makes communication easier. The main advantage of metrc units, by the way, isn‘t the absolute value of 1 metre or 1 kilogram, but the fact that their super- and sub-units are related by powers of 10 and that this matches with our number system that is also based on (powers of) 10. Babylonians (whose number system was based on 60) or Celts (whose number system was based on 20), might have found the metric slightly inconvenient 😉
For the imperial guys, we metric guys don’t have trouble with inches. You dig now how powerful metric is? Monitors, drums, you name it, if there’s a standard in inches, we don’t need to think.
You guys can’t integrate metric in imperial, because imperial is too complicated. But inches standards in the metric world are and were never a problem. That’s how superior metric is.
Hold your ground US! Give them an inch and they'll take 5,280 feet😂
I love watching you soak up new language!
"There's two types of countries, those that use metric and those that put a man on the moon" - Yep, Myanmar, famous for it's successful lunar program.
The whole "but it doesn't make sense to me, I don't have an idea what a kilometer is => we can't possibly use it" makes my eyes roll back, and not in a good way.
If something making sense was a prerequisite to using it, nobody would use English (you know, that language that's been described as "five languages in a trench coat" ) ! You start using it, and then it slowly starts to 'make sense' .
If interested, here are two really good videos explaining the differences and the pros of the metric system for science as well as every day life.
METRIC SYSTEM I ua-cam.com/video/zkuYuRn6Vls/v-deo.html
METRIC SYSTEM II ua-cam.com/video/Z8WoTOix4c4/v-deo.html
The advantage of the metric.system is that there is no conversion factor except 1000. The definition do not really give a advantage to metrix.
3:20 "I feel like some of this is satire"
Bro... I wish that statement was a joke...
Yes we have Km/h so when we drive 100 km/h you wil drive 160 mls/h so to keep that in line you have to drive i think about 80 mls/h and like why are there countries where they drive at te left and also use mls/h?? And yes metric is just in mm and not in 7 and a quater or something. And why are there diverence temperature anouncments while they are all the same? C/F America like England are to stuburn to use Metric!
1 mile = 1.6 kilometer, and 1 km = 0.625 mi,
thus 100 mph = 160 kph, and 100 kph = 62 mph
(and not the other way around)
@@Anson_AKB So what i was thinking of my head so sorry!!
I says this as a person raised on the Metric system. I don't think Americans should feel forced to give up the Imperial system just because everyone else uses something different - its part of the American identity, culture and language. However, I firmly believe that the US education system should do a lot more to educate students in using the metric system so that they are better prepared when they enter the real world. Other countries have no problem in educating their students in speaking English to a high level of proficiency - The US should have no problem in teaching another "language" (the language of the universe, lol) to its students
They are not British imperial units, they are US custom units. The English and Americans can't even completely agree on the same dimensions. The English pint is smaller than the American pint and even a European shot glass is larger.
I still remember the horrors we went through as students at university when we had to use an American book in physics that was entirely in imperial measures 😱 constantly converting the measures led to a lot of mistakes, I can see why that Mars lander crashed …
How do you want to do science with these arbitrary measurements that are based on the length of this once king’s foot and his arm, so totally unrelated? How do you say 1 picometer in imperial? Like this: 1 pm = 3.9370078740157E-11 inch. And is that then a British inch or an American one?
As stated in an earlier comment, we still use old medieval names for measures like ounce, pounds and acres, but nowadays they’re just short for 100 grams, 500 grams and 10 000 square meters.
And as stated in the video, America has already adopted the metric system; not only by defining the imperial measurements by metric ones but you use it every day: the dollar is metric …
03.55 those "Alabama accent" mean to be a sarcasm.... Van Braun is German rocket scientist... hence the "nein nein nein" jokes...
"whats`s the most puzzling thing about the USA?" Otto von Bismarck : "from hundreds of native languages, they chose the language of the former colonial power". And their "imperial" system.
8:50 My dude... I'm one of those engineers, And I'm glad I don't have to do "doubles" for my American friends any longer.
😅👌🏼
"...what is it about the Imperial System that just has America grasping along for dear life?..."
Money. Seriously, that's what it comes down to. Switching to metric would cost a lot of money, and the longer it's delayed, the more money it'll cost. Every textbook needs to be updated, every road sign (probably twice), every car, ever label on every product. When other countries switched over, it cost a lot to do, and took _years,_ and _even now_ many countries that are supposedly fully metric use a mix of units. British people still order a pint down at the pub, frequently talk about how many miles something is away, and so on. You get the same in Canada.
But you asked if metric is superior. It is. Flat out. In fact, the video you watched didn't even mention several ways that metric was already invading the USA. Ever watch a medical drama and they are deciding how much of a drug to inject someone with? "Get me 14 CCs of thorazine!" What's a CC? It's a 'cubic centimeter'. The medical establishment uses metric, in the USA, _right now._ They just don't spell it out, so most people just thing 'CC' is some strange, drug measuring unit. Most drug busts are measured in kilograms, and you can buy a 2 liter of soda at the market.
What the video said is also true. If you've ever worked in metric (no, I don't mean picking the right wrench for a particular nut, I mean designing and building things purely in metric), you'd see how easy it is.
At the end there, the video got a bit confusing, because it showed that metric still has magic numbers. Why is a meter defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of second? Where does that number 299,792,458 _come from?_ The answer is that we already had a meter defined elsewhere (by two marks on a bar). That number was chosen to make the answer as close to a meter as possible without resorting to decimal places. The same is true with the other magic numbers in the system. The units of measure they represent already existed, and so magic numbers like that were selected in order to make the eventual answer match up with what we already had in order to keep the units the same instead of making a whole new system.
What's _crucial_ here, though, is how much of that you need to remember in order to _use_ the metric system. ... None. You don't need to know _any_ of it, because it doesn't _matter._ The only time it's _at all_ important is if you're calibrating a new measuring device (or checking/recalibrating an old one) and, for whatever reason, don't have an already calibrated device to check it against. That is, if you want to make a meter stick and you don't _have_ a meter stick around to make sure they're the same, _then_ you need that weird number. But you _absolutely don't_ need it, ever, to _use_ meters.
Compare that with the various units of measure in Imperial. In order to _use_ inches, feet, yards, and miles, you _do_ have to know the magic numbers. You have to know there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1760 yards in a mile, because _without_ that knowledge, you can't use them. You also need to know there are 16 ounces in a pound, and 2240 pounds in a ton. Unless it's a fluid, then you need to know there's 20 _fluid_ ounces in a pint, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon. So to use the metric system, you need to keep track of ounces vs fluid ounces, and the numbers 12, 3, 1760, 16, 2240, 20, 2, and 4, and _correctly_ associate them with each unit of measure with _no indication_ in the unit itself what the appropriate number to associate with it is, and two units _with the same name_ that measure different things (even excluding pounds-weight vs pounds-force). And it's not like any of those units are never used, and almost all are even _frequently_ used (the pint less so, but it's still out there). You need to keep track of _eight_ separate magic numbers with no help, pure rote memorization. So how many numbers do you need to use metric? Three. 10, 100, 1000. No one measures anything in decimeters or dekameters or hectometers. 10 mm in a cm, 100 cm in a m, 1000 m in a km. No one uses anything other than grams and kilograms, so 1000 there. And milliliters vs liters. Plus, in all cases the units have different names entirely _and_ the conversion is _part of_ the name of the unit, making it transferable from one unit to another. If you know there's 1000 MILLImeters in a meter, it's not hard to work out there's 1000 MILLIliters in a liter, it's right in the name of each sub unit (that is, different measures of the same thing).
Add on top of this the ease of conversion between units, just shifting decimal places, and it gets even clearer why metric is superior. How often have you been tired, knowing something has totaled to 213 ounces, and tried to convert that to pounds to see what you should do with it? You can't do that conversion in your head, _especially_ if you're a little off. But 213 milliliters to liters? You can do that one in your head, even when you're tired or feeling off. Mistakes don't _entirely_ go away (you might shift the decimal by two spots instead of three), but they are _drastically_ reduced.
Of course, if it were up to me to unilaterally decide, I wouldn't promote either system. I'd start over, right from numbers. I'd invent a new numbering system, with new symbols, in base 16. Why base 16? It's binary, and given our reliance on computers today, being able to read 3E and A84 _directly_ instead of having to try to convert them to their decimal equivalents of 62 and 2692 respectively would be _enormously_ helpful. Then I'd do the same thing the weights and measures people did, base it on things about the universe that don't ever change, but I'd change the magic numbers to something that ends in a bunch of zeros, probably all of them starting with 1, as well. So instead of a meter being the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds, the base unit of length would be the distance light travels in 10,000,000 of a second, with that number 10,000,000 being hexadecimal, meaning it works out to 1/268,435,456 of a second (10,000,000 in hexadecimal = 268,435,456 in decimal). The base unit would be slightly shorter than a meter (it'd be 89.5%, roughly, of its length), but the magic numbers would (kinda) be gone, certainly be easier to _remember_ (which is easier to remember, 10,000,000 or 299,792,458), and still all work. Now we have a system based on science, to be the language of not just _physical_ science but also _computer_ science as well.
And, as it should be obvious from the above, I'd use different names for all the units of measure so they wouldn't be confused at all, either with each other _or_ with the units we use now.
The one snag with all the above is... time. Right now, there's 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. Using the above, there's no way the time will work out that neatly. If the base unit of time is called a fempt, and we define it as the transition frequency in Hz of that Cesium 133 atom set to 100,000,000 (in hexadecimal), a 'second' would be about twice the duration it is now, but not precisely. Make a dekafempt be 10 of those, and a hectofempt be 100, kilofempt be 1000, and so on. A dekafempt would be about 21 seconds, a hektofempt would be 2 minutes 34 seconds, a kilofempt would be 35 minutes 40 seconds, and there'd be 40 kilofempts 373.8 fempts in a solar day. I suspect dekafempt and hektofempt would fall out of use, and leave us with fempt and kilofempt. Time would be metered then, though, and I think we'd all just get used to understanding that when the time is 12,000 fempt (which would translate to pretty close to 7 AM), it's time to get up (for... y'know, lots of people... with this 'normal life' thing I keep hearing about), and that the day ends at a weird time of 40,374 fempt. However the one _advantage_ to this going forward is that we'd _expect_ time to be weird like that... which is _very useful_ if we ever colonize other planets. After all, a 'day' being 24 hours is unique to Earth and, moreover, Earth's solar day isn't even constant. It's slowing down. We have to add a second every so often to our clocks (the idea of doing this was put in place in 1972, and we've added extra seconds 27 times since then). If we all got used to the idea that a day could be redefined in terms of fempts, then when we colonized Mars we wouldn't be trying to express the 'clean' system from Earth into a broken 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds. That messes with our expectations because we're _expecting_ a clean measure right now. But if we were _expecting_ something unruly like 40,374 fempts (which sometimes gets shortened as the Earth's rotation slows), then it being 41,484 on Mars I think would be easier for us to handle and adapt to. You could still have a UTC based on the number of fempts since some arbitrary starting point (probably October 10 at 10:10:10 from the old clock in year 10, so the starting point, under the old system, would be 10:10:10 10/10/10) for a form of absolute measurement anywhere in the universe. Make 'weeks' (using some new name) 10 days, ignore months, and years would be however long that was to get around the star the planet is orbiting (there'd be 36.5 'weeks' in a year on Earth). All these weird numbers being specific to a planet prepares us for living among the stars where planets won't all have the same values for those things anyway _and_ even the planet's we're _on_ are changing over time.
I mean your 9mm are metric and when measuring smaller things you have to use metric
We did fractions at school, watching you i had to stop and wonder why. It dawned on me why it was just for numbers.
Juring WW2 a famous F-up was in Africa, Brits were going to fight and travel accros the desert, the French used metric. So they put l's in instead of the gallons the Brits asked for, whoops so we ran out of fuel BUT this is part of why the SAS was created.
Yep he takes the Piss alot.
I would love to listen to this clip but this guys S's are such a high whistle, SO sharp, they really hurt my ears! Am I alone in this?
You're thinking basic units. When you get into rocket science it's a bit more complicated.
Yeah it can get a bit whacky, but I also enjoyed physics in school and play Kerbal space program. And as a Metric native it's fine :).
If I would have to nail down why I don't like Imperial: Its just a pain in the ass to do calculation and measurements with. I've worked years as a Systems Developer in the Measurement and Production industry. Converting within the Imperial is total nonsense, no structure and when I had to convert from imperial to metric so I could use SI units drove me mad. I've hunted bugs because of that for 2 weeks. And fractions introduce floating point errors because of technical limitations of the computer so one has to be aware when working with high precision stuff. And Imperial is nothing but fractions after calculations...
I'm fluent in Metric 🤣
At least in cooking metric is better! Is it is much more precise to use a scale with grams and kilo's than to use cups and spoons. More precise and quicker to note down than eg two one third of a cup🙄
"Is the metric system better" Yes.
only one question, praticaly 200 countrys in this world, how many of them use the imperial system?
simplicity is why metric is better...
While the metric system isn't more precise than the imperial system, it is way easier to understand and work with; that's what makes it better.
Are you joking right?😂
@@gorkavelasco
Nope.
@@dellinger71 i mean you can use micrometers instead of milimiters and increase the precision so i don't know what you mean. I think metric is superior in every aspect
@@gorkavelasco
Imperial dimensions can also be calculated extremely small, it is just much more complex and the potential for error is considerably higher.
@@dellinger71 you are proving my point. Overcomplicating measurements leads to failure and imprecision so metric wins again. Get rid of imperial because at this point you are holding to it just for EGO not facts
0:00 Unequivocally.
Unlock? No. Measure precisely no problem. Zeros out waste.
Inferial, the US uses Inferial 👌🏻
Love the Irish Sarcasm !!