Ok but now we need a video explaining how to best conceptualize the measurements of a stadion, a parasang, a Roman mile, a talent, a fathom, a cubit, a mna, a league, a schoenus, etc.
A fathom is about the size of the average human male, a talent is about the weight of a large bag of concrete or a little less than the weight of two 40lb bags, a stadion is 185 meters or 1/10 of a nautical mile. A parasang is the same length as a double stacked train in the U.S. A Roman mile is 1,000 military steps with the left foot and doesn't seem to be a set distance. A cubit is about the length of many windshield wiper blades or just a little shorter than the length of 4 soda cans although there is no set measurement. A mina is 1/6 of a talent and some bags of dog food come in that weight. A league is not a set distance and was about how far a person can walk in an hour. Schoenus is based on a place and not a distance although various writers have used it to mean a distance, but that distance isn't agreed upon.
Bonus: Perhaps the most important one for tourists is that $5.00 in stores is never just $5.00. It's always $5.00 + ?% where ?% is the local sales tax. I learned this the hard way 😂
@@mytube001 knowing the city rules is important. we visited a friend in Nebraska a few months ago. we went to one of the downtown restaurants in Omaha. we knew about the tipping culture, that's fine and no big deal. but we were a little confused how they can get way wih charging a "convenience fee" of 2% on top of the price + tip? seriously Omaha what's wrong with you. they didn't even do that stupid crap in California or New York.
Having the tax not hidden in the price lets the populace see with every purchase what their tax burden is. When you lay down your 5 euro note and walk out, you're not walking out with €5 worth of merchandise if that includes a VAT. If you stop to think about it, maybe you know what that tax is, but I bet you rarely stop to think about it.
I'm an Englishwomen in her 60s, so I can think in both metric and imperial, except for temperature. I can only think in celsius now. If I'm running short distances, I think in kilometres. If I'm running long distances (or driving) I think in miles. If I'm cooking, I have old recipes in pounds and ounces and new recipes in grammes. I can cope with both. If I'm telling people how tall I am, I tell them in feet and inches, but I can cope with my weight in stones and pounds or in kilos. If I'm talking about paper, I work in A1, A2, A3 etc. American measures bemuse me.
6:06 correction: you would have to add 50% onto the mile value to get 30 km, but to get from 30 km to 20 miles you have to subtract 33% or a third. Subtracting 50% would get you just 15 miles
You misunderstood. It’s a difference of 50% from the target. Your way works too, but I was trying to keep it conceptually simple by keeping the target the core reference frame.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I understood what you meant, you just said it wrong in the video making it potentially confusing for people who dont already know what exactly is meant
I mean that's basic understanding of percentages, it might be better to use ratios instead of percents added or taken away in this case one relative to the other is 1.5/1 or 150% percent the other would be 1/1.5 aka 2/3s or 66.66666 ...%
In the UK, and I'm not making this up, generally, measuring things goes like this: What are you measuring? Speed? Miles. Distance? If it's a long distance, and you're jogging, kilometers. If it's a long distance, and you're not jogging, miles. If it's a short distance, metres, or feet and inches. Whichever you're more comfortable with (I often use both interchangeably). Temperature? Degrees centigrade (I can quite honestly say I've never measured anything in Fahrenheit in my life). Weight? If you're weighing a person, stones, pounds and ounces. If it's not a person, kilogrammes and grammes, and metric tons. Volume? If it's beer, pints. If it's not beer, but it's not milk either, litres. If it's milk, but it's vegan milk, also litres If it's any other type of milk, pints. We've been officially metric since 1965, but in practice, we've sort of mish-mashed the two together in a system that somehow works and people are, oddly, not confused by.
What an interesting mix. I knew about the UK using miles, so at least US speed limits and distances should be familiar to a Brit. It just feels that the USA is outdated by continuing to rely on other imperial measures like Fahrenheit, though; few countries other than the US extensively use Fahrenheit, and no major countries do. (I remember once seeing a movie on Lifetime that had a British exchange student as a character, and the dialogue said that he should/would be using kilometers. I knew that was very wrong; in the back of my mind, I made fun of the scriptwriters and editors for this oversight...)
Australia is like this but a step closer to metric. Only your grandparents know how long a mile is or how heavy 6 stone and 10 pounds is (I just pulled those numbers out of my arse, but I honestly don't know: I think stones are multiple kilos each, not too many though - pounds are like half a kilo - so my guess is that 6 stone and 10 pounds is about 35 kilo). If you smoke weed, you know how much an ounce is, otherwise not likely. Humans are still measured in feet and inches, especially other humans, but you know your own height in cm. Packaged beer is in millilitres, but the amount of beer you order at the pub is highly regional/dialectical/customary (in general you're more likely to be drinking pots/middies/schooners/handles/half-pints than pints, lest your beverage becomes warm and flat in the heat. Old fellas in hotter areas often drink ponies (quarter pints) for maximum refreshment. Milk is in litres. Also it's 'litres' and not 'liters' for us too.
@@digitalbrentable I wouldn't be able to tell you what my weight is in metric, or my height. But if I were to weigh say an object, I would use kilogrammes, and the same if I were to for example, measure a room; I'd use metres. It's literally that engrained into everyone's collective psyche. Mind you, I think younger people (and I'm 38) have a tendency to use metric a bit more, with older people leaning more towards imperial.
@Dr Gazza the weird thing in the UK is that we've been officially metric since 1965, but the way it was implemented was done in such a half-arsed way, we basically ended up with the mish-mash of a 'system' we have now.
I could be just talking out of my arse, but I suspect the difference in uptake lies in a cultural difference between Brits and Australians. In many respects we're more similar than we are different, but having lived in both countries I would speculate that people in the UK are more regionally distinct in a way that is often expressed in a kind of stubborn pride. Whereas Australia is governmentally more centralised and culturally more homogenous - the differences in accent and custom between cities thousands of kilometres apart are less than those of villages mere miles apart in the UK (let alone between the member states of the UK). As such, when the government of Australia implements some kind of national reform it's not as effectively resisted by entrenched local cultures rooted in identity.
I’m a bit more familiar with metric thanks to working in a hospital here in NYC that used metric for weights, lengths, temperature, and volumes. I worked in a neonatal unit so metric was a lot more precise for working with premature babies who might weigh only 600 grams.
Metric is pretty much required in the medical field thanks to a measurement called a mole. A mole uses Avagadro’s number and makes chemical reactions down to the molecule really accurate. For example, a mole of Hydrogen is its atomic weight in grams. This makes things like the saline solutions in IV drips much more safe.
@@ericbarlow6772 I remember Avogadro’s number well from chemistry class. 6.02 X 10 to the 23rd power. Thankfully, we didn’t have to do that when figuring out medications at work!!
@@cak8132 lol. Yeah it’s mostly used in the pharmaceutical industry to ensure each tablet or IV bag has the exact same amount of ingredients for safety and efficacy.
3:44 A simple, but quite accurate, approximation to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius: [°C] ≈ ([°F]-30)/2 (Subtract 30 degrees from the “American” temperature, then divide by 2) The correct formula is [°C] = ([°F]-32)*5/9 but this one is easier to do by mind and doesn’t diverge significantly.
I find the Fibonacci sequence quite useful for converting between miles and kilometres when it comes to shorter distances. If a distance in kilometres is a Fibonacci number (e.g. 8) , then it is the previous Fibonacci number in miles (e.g. 5) , and a distance in miles (e.g. 8) is the following Fibonacci number in kilometres (e.g. 13). You can also say Fibonacci numbers times 10 (80 km/h = 50 mph). Even if the distance in question is not a Fibonacci number, it is the same percentage of the next Fibonacci number (e.g. 4 miles is 80% of 5 miles) as the value in the other system is a percentage of the corresponding Fibonacci number (80% of 8 = 0,8 x 8 = 6,4 kilometres).
I can't take credit for this, but I don't remember where I saw it first. The mi/km conversion factor is almost exactly phi, the Golden Ratio or around 1.618. This means, if you see a Fibonacci number of miles, the next Fibonacci number will be the same distance in kilometers. Ex. 3mi ≈ 5km 13mi ≈ 21km 55mi ≈ 89km
Here in Colombia we have a weird combination of metric and imperial, not as bad as Canada, but still weird. You go to the hardware store and can get nails, pipes and other things in inches. Then, you go to the gas station and get your tank filled up in gallons. We even use "metric" pounds (500 grams) for foodstuffs like raice or coffee.
speaking of Canadian units, we get butter in 1lb bricks but they're labeled as "454g" officially funny story, in the US, they sell it in 1/4lb sticks instead of 1lb bricks, so when I read a recipe that said "use 1/2 stick if butter," I used a full 1/2lb, everything was greasy
@@1224chrisng it is probably because imperial units have been aligned with the international system. Btw, a metric pound is actually 500gr. Then you have imperial and metric tons, which can be confusing... in Canada, the only unit I have not heard so far is the "stone". Supposedly it was thrown away because people would break their feet too often. ;-)
Interestingly, one metric foot (30 cm exactly) is even closer. I advocate that the US adopt the metric system, except with the light-nanosecond ("foot") as the unit of length, and the speed of light equal to one billion ft/s by definition.
Regarding the "tsp" and "tbsp", well, we do use that a lot in recipes over here (I'm Swedish). Your "tsp" is our "tsk" for "tesked" - literally teaspoon, and also 5 ml. For "tbsp", we use "msk", for "matsked", meaning "food spoon", and that's 15 ml. So three "tsk" to the "msk". :)
Same in Denmark/Norway at least. Makes me wonder what set the standard: Informal 'spoon norms' coalescing into fixed measurements, or fixed measurements imposed on spoon production? Spoons are great.
Same in Germany ("Teelöffel" = teaspoon, "Esslöffel" = tablespoon). It's just a practical unit. Just fill up a spoon with the ingredient and there you go. We even have "Messerspitze" (knifetip).
@@daisybrain9423 Yep, same in Sweden. We call it "knivsudd" (kniv s udd) meaning "knife tip". A very small amount. There's also "krm" which stands for "kryddmått" - "spice measure". It's 1 ml. Slightly more than a "knivsudd" (which isn't defined but would be roughly one quarter to one half of a milliliter).
The great thing about tsp and tbsp is that the US (almost 5 and 15) and the metric ones (exactly 5 and 15) are close enough that you should be fine with either set of measuring spoons :D
No, the great thing about teaspoons and tablespoons is that we have those in Europe too, so it's quite easy to use one for measurement. Which is exactly what we do in cooking recipes. But I wouldn't dream of saying that a tablespoon is an exact measurement. You can fill it as much as you want and still count as one.
@@povilzem That's exactly the question: if you measure a tbsp of a liquid (syrup for example) the spoon is filled up to the limb of the spoon. If you take wheat or sugar for example you may fill the spoon over the top, or you may fill it to the limb - what is the correct measure?
Your approximations seem pretty spot on. As an American, I'd be perfectly fine switching to metric. Sure, it might take me a bit to get used to the measurements in my head, but I would adapt. One point I would've made when you suggested money in a sexagesimal as opposed to decimal for the ease of fractions, is just how long the UK kept their £sd system, where there was 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound. The system stuck around until the 1970's! I think they made arguments about how easy they could do fractions on that system as a reason to keep it, but I could be wrong about that.
9:25 actually, for a long time in some parts of Europe, one "pound" (Pfund, libre) was defined as exactly half a kilogram. It ceased to be an official units, but when you order "one pound of minced meat" eg in Germany, you will usually get 500 grams. Btw, gallons is tricky because a British gallon is considerably more than a US gallon (4.5 l, vs 3.8 l). Fortunately in Britain they sell petrol by the litre, although many people still talk about efficiency in terms of mpg rather than comsumption in liters per 100 kilometers.
Yes, a pound ("Pfund") is understood to be half a kilogram and a hundredweight ("Zentner") is a hundred pounds, so 50 kg. They're not really commonly used, but well understood. And for some weird reason we measure the diameters of bikewheels in inches ("Zoll").
@@daisybrain9423 I think whether they are commonly used depends a lot of the region where you live. And perhaps also of your age. In my perception "Pfund" and "Zentner" are very commonly used, but that not be true for people under the age of maybe 40.
Be careful with those tho. They're not universal across Europe, as they are historical units. They may change even in regions within countries. For example, a Castillian or Spanish pound is around 460g, but if you are buying food in Barcelona and you ask for a pound of ground meat, that would be a Catalan pound, or around 400g.
One of the problems with the imperial system was its lack of uniformity between the US and UK measures. Before Canada converted to selling gasoline in litres, for example, the British imperial gallon was used (4.546 L) as opposed to the US (3.785 L) gallon. This caused some confusion for tourists visiting each others' countries.
Reminds me of how in tabletop RPGs people seemingly have no problems with feet/inches and lbs for height and weight, but start complaining when I say there's 12 brass pennies to a shilling, and 20 silver shillings to a gold crown.
I’m from Australia and of course I have a subjective bias for the metric system. I have been brought up with it. I’m a huge fan of American renovation shows that are aired on TV here and I am never able to get my head around fractions. When a length of timber for example will need to be cut less than an inch. I work in the construction industry here in Australia and we drop the centimetres completely and just use millimetres and metres. The conversion is easy from one to the other.
I’d like to add Luke I am a fan of your content keep doing what you’re doing. Especially the Latin and Greek videos you post. I am of Greek decent and it makes me happy to see people of other ethnicities and cultures take an interest in my ancestors language. Kind regards
Thanks, Stefan! I really appreciate the comment. As for Greeks in Australia, I frequently listen to a podcast from SBS news in Modern Greek, out of Australia of course. I love how many Hellenic emigrés made their way down under.
It was particularly weird for me (in the UK) because I was basically the last generation that was taught imperial alongside metric. And I also had a physics teacher who was super-super keen on using metric, and a dad who stubbornly refused to use it (for example, we had a weighing scales at home that was in stones, pounds, and ounces). So being caught between those two worlds, I ended up, like a lot of British people, super familiar with some metric units, but not others, and super familiar with some imperial units (for example, I always measure my height in feet and inches, as do lots of Brits), but not others (eg, I can honestly say I've never used Fahrenheit to measure temperature in my life).
AWESOME video, Capt Ranieri. Tks! I am a metric accustomed non-American living outside the US. I remember that when I used to work in Clinical Chemistry (Med Lab Sc), Americans would always use milligrams per liter as a unit of measure & the rest of the world would use millimoles per liter as the unit of measure. This just drives me nuts. Ha ha.
We use a mix of both in UK and I think that’s very beneficial. We even use some measurements that other countries don’t use, like we weigh people in stones, not pounds or kilograms
As a European living in North America, the most difficult conversion I found was from miles/gallon to litre/100km : first convert each unit, then reverse the result, then multiply by "100/1,608 sth". That's harsh.
I'm always flummoxed by wind speeds in meters per second, being accustomed to thinking in miles per hour. A "per" always complicates things, and _especially_ when the conventions are inverse as in your example of fuel economy.
I find it weird how Americans weigh their drinks in ounces instead of ML or CL and this is coming from a Brit who was taught both metric and imperial
Рік тому+1
US nationals normally come to Argentina with Summer clothes and since ARG is in South America they spect to see palm trees, margaritas and yellow feber. BUT the moment they go out of the airport they find out that argentina is actually next to Antartica...
Funny enough. Almost no 2x4s are 2inx4in. They used to be but no longer. We kept the name as its role in construction stayed the same but with better quality of wood available, its more like 1.5in x 3.5in these days.
All people really need to remember (regarding distance/speed) is that 100km equals ~ 62 miles. Or that 1 mile equals ~ 1.6km. In the case of the speed limit shown (25mph), this would equal ~ 40km per hour. Easy, eh? In the case(s) of higher speed limit states, such as Nevada, Texas or Montana, a 75mph speed limit would equate to ~ 120km per hour.
7:50 they were separate in ancient Greece as well! Distances between cities were counted by stadia, while smaller distances inside a city were counted with podes!
For most of the metric units there is an imperial unit that is about 10% smaller. 1 meter is a yard + 10%, 1 metric pound (defined as 1/2 kg) is an imperial pound +10%, 1 liter is a quart + 10%.
This country was supposed to metricize in 1976, the year I declared my independence of the English system with Britain and the Commonwealth Nations. Burma (Myanmar) still uses the Imperial and Liberia still uses our obsolete system. Since 1976, I am now in a position to convert to metric nearly immediately. I refuse to use the obsolete system. In 1976, I was taking physics and organic chemistry, which makes it much easier with one system.
I lived in Puerto Rico and I just remember I think is the only us jurisdiction using the metric system. Is sadly getting mixed with the us imperial system as it continues to integrate into the USA. It took me a while to see how much I was paying for gas and how much I was the traveling in distances. The cars imported come in us miles😂. Is a weird mess. I remember using a trick to calculate this stuff quick in on paper in high school but forgot how now😅
when I saw a "spoon" unit in a recipe I have been always wondering which spoon to take: the bigger one, smaller one, or maybe a medium one, now I can convert it to milliliters, thanks!
Because Phi (the mathematical constant) is close to 1.61 (Φ ≃ 1.618033.... etc ad infinitum) you can use the Fibonacci sequence to approximately convert between miles and kilometers, because the ratio of numbers in the sequence approach phi. The sequence starts 1,1 then adds the previous two terms to get the next so 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55 etc... for kilometers to miles take the closest Fibonacci number and step up one in the sequence, for miles to kilometers take the previous. This may not always be practical if the number you're converting isn't close to a Fibonacci number, but I always found it interesting and, often enough, handy.
You can make an argument for Fahrenheit being a better scale for meteorology since it’s scale is between the freezing point of water and blood temperature and Celsius(oops, Kelvin has technically replaced it) for cooking as it’s between the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water. I also want to expand on the non decimal argument. These measures tend to be highly composite numbers. A highly composite number is a number that has more factors than any number less than itself. They tend to be useful for non precision tasks. This isn’t as necessary today since our tools are much more precise. As for the money, the British pound used to be 1 pound = 240 pennies. That’s a highly composite number and even though it was a weight holder over from Roman occupation, it was actually very useful for commerce. It persisted for a long time because of this. Now I agree with your 10s argument since our number system is decimal and that makes it much easier for us to break things apart by decimals. And as you said growing up in a system influences our biases. It could explain why a an hour is 60 minutes seems weird to us decimal people but would be natural to a Babylonian person whose number system was based 60. By the way, metric time was tried and failed.
Metric units: all in Greek or Latin. Luke approves :) US system: well, actually has tons of stuff from Latin too. MILES comes from Latin to 1000. Pounds and the short lb (from Libra) also come from Latin. Probably more stuff too. Anyone wants to help?
The mile has metric-ish roots, being 1000 paces for Roman legionnaires, if I recall correctly. You can see it in the name. Maybe my legs are shorter then theirs -- my pace is 5 feet, so 1000 of my paces is exactly 5000 feet, which is pretty close to the 5280 feet in a mile.
@A. Nonymous I _believe_ that it's the other way around. The chain was invented for surveying miles and rods and furlongs. Mr. Wikipedia says the chain and link as statutory measures followed the invention of the physical surveyor's chain by Mr. Gunter. But let's not throw around too many of these arcane units, or the metricians' heads will really start to explode. :-)
I'm an American, but also a fierce proponent of metric adoption in the US. I've used Celsius on my phone and car's thermometer exclusively since 2018, and try to use metric as often as I can for projects and the like. What first got me into measurements was my grandfather. My grandfather worked as a professor of engineering at our local college, and in engineering he used almost exclusively metric. The exceptions were when he would work with other local businesses or use units only used by engineers (such as Rankine which is an absolute temperature scale based on Fahrenheit.) As someone who wants to follow in his footsteps and become an engineer, I look forward to using metric more often. On the more broad topic, I'd love to see more videos like this. Maybe you can talk about the strange situations in Canada and the UK, or about lost history with regards to the metric system such as John Shafroth's attempt to adopt metric in the US in the early 1900s or how the lack of metric adoption in the US has negative consequences for both us and the rest of the world (Randy Bancroft has some good resources here: themetricmaven.com/metrication-resources/ ) Overall, great video as usual. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the comment! Yes the Metric Maven is fabulous. Maybe Randy would be interested in a collaboration; I'll have to reach out. I see he has a new book so that might be an opportunity.
Why metric is more convenient than imperial/US : fundamental metric units are all related 1 litre = 1000cm3 = 1kg of water. Also, metric is decimal, meaning you don't have to twist your neurons to figure our that 1km = 1000 metres and that 1 metre = 100 centimetres, as opposed to 1 foot = 12 inches (ok fine) but 1 yard = 3 feet and 1 mile = 1760 yards. Oh, btw, 1 US gallon is not the same as 1 UK gallon, because, you know.... why would they be? ;-) Also, US people, why Farenheit, where 96 is the temperature of the blood of a horse, come on?! As opposed to 0 celsius = water freezing and 100 celsius = water boiling. But otherwise, I can understand that a European's appreciation of 1cm is similar to an USian appreciation of 1 inch, where those units become instinctive. Anecdote : in Quebec, travel distances are expressed as km but body measurements are expressed in british imperial units.
It's worth learning Imperial, since it will never change. Metric seems nice in concept - until you realize the cost of switching over. Our infrastructure budget is in shambles at best - we can't afford all the changes i.e. the road signage and other structural changes that will be needed to do so.
Great video! If 1 yard is a little bit over 1 meter why don't Americans use yards to wrap their around meters? Or maybe they do? Are yards even used much in daily life?
We don’t use yards very much, unless we have experience with football or shooting. And yes, a yard is a bit under a meter; I may have misstated that in the video.
Haha. Actually, I actively discourage non-Americans from using US measures with Americans. It's not like a language that should be respected; it's essentially a bad way of doing math, that we should be discouraged from using. But since we take badly to being imposed on by "elitists," the key is simply to use metric exclusively, and if we don't understand, help us understand through the input method - "this is how long a meter is; this is two meters" - rather than translating through conversions. It's the only way we'll acquire metric.
While I 100% agree with the conclusion-that metric is a far superior system to US Customary, I would argue that it’s primary advantage over traditional unit systems like US customary, British Imperial, and countless others, comes NOT primarily from its decimalization-math works in any base, and some nondecimal bases would probably have been a better choice than decimal *if our standard mathematical notation wasn’t decimal by default*-nor in that it is based on supposedly more “fundamental” enlightenment concepts-the original definitions sound even, but are still ultimately arbitrary, and their current, more precise and replicable definitions are ALSO used by the current US Customary system, which is currently defined on metric and involves very inelegant multipliers to keep them roughly in step with their Napoleonic predecessors-but in that it is a SINGLE, top-down, unified system designed for easy conversion between different dimensions (through the relations of base units) and scales (through the regular order-of-magnitude prefix system). A sexigesimal metric system paired with a system of sexigesimal positional numerals would be just as good as a decimal one paired with decimal positional numerals, and better in some situations, but US Customary ain’t that. It’s a collection of dozens of different measuring systems each developed to be convenient for one specific traditional trade that people stitched together into a frankenstein’s monster of a complete measurement system so it *could* be used in modern situations, but really wasn’t designed for the amount of unit conversion professionals have to deal with nowadays. And a single worldwide standard is better for everyone, whether we picked the “right” size for our initial base units or the “right” mathematical base to scale it with is ultimately irrelevant.
It's perfectly correct to use the pound as a unit of mass; that's what it means on, for example, a food label. Of course, you can also use it as a unit of force, which is why we distinguish the pound-mass and the pound-force when context is not sufficient. (And then there are the slug and the poundal, defined so that a pound-force is one slug foot per square second and a poundal is one pound-mass foot per square second, but nobody uses those in daily life, and only rarely in engineering anymore.)
Looking at NIST's definitions, it seems that the default meaning for ‘pound’ is the avoirdupois pound-mass (defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg), and if you mean anything else (troy pound, apothecary pound, or any version of pound-force), then you're supposed to say.
I write stories sometimes, mostly in English (not my native langauge), and I always use yards whenever I'm mentioning distance, unless it's a few inches, because it's easier to convert in my head 😂
In Austria we have this weird thing when we go shopping cheese or ham, we neither use grams (although you could, but you’d be immediately recognised as a stranger) nor kilograms, we use decagrams (we just say Deka), which is 10 grams. I have no idea why we do this, because it’s literally only for shopping ham or cheese 😂 Fun fact: In Italy they use “etti”, which are hectograms (100 grams) in the same situation only.
No, this is actually a convention of *languages* , not regions. In English, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, Scots, Gaelic, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Tagalog, much of Arabic, as well as a few other languages, we use commas for thousands and points for decimals. Many other European languages, as you note, do the opposite.
In British English it's conventional to use commas when for example denoting thousands ('a thousand' would be '1,000; a million would be '1,000,000, and so on), as it is in much of the rest of the English speaking world. That's not exclusively an American thing.
@@jonathanwebster7091 That’s right, the world is pretty split on it. Israel 🇮🇱, Mexico 🇲🇽, Japan 🇯🇵 and China 🇨🇳 uze dots instead of commas. I live in the UK 🇬🇧.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Everyone should just use spaces to separate thousands, that way it doesn't really matter if you use a period or a comma for the decimals, it's clear from context.
As someone from the US who likes to cook, I didn't even know about the teaspoon-to-cup ratio. We really ought to be pushing more for further adoption of the metric system.
Until I made this video, I had no idea either. I did the research and found out. But yeah, it's interesting: as metric units of volume have become more common, the US units for volume are less well known.
@@polyMATHY_Luke in Quebec, where I live and where both systems are used, the cups, spoons, etc...are metric. 1 tspoon = 5ml, 1tb spoon = 15ml, 1 cup = 250ml, ...
@@polyMATHY_Luke So, speaking as someone who's in my mid-20s, do you foresee earnest pushes for further US metrification occurring within, say, my lifetime or maybe that of the next generation?
@@metalpunk I think we could be as metricofied as the uk by the next 50 years or so, especially as the us becomes majority minority soon. However I think that the units will not all be adopted at once, and there will be a mix and match by then instead of full adoption. So first of all, we do use many metric units already in day to day, electrical units are all metric (Ohm, amp, volt, kWh), as are units for data (we also just started using lumens for light instead of watts once LEDs took off). What I think could happen first is that cooking units get pegged to metric, either at quart~liter or tsp~5 mL. We rarely use ounces any more except for the weight of newborn babies for some reason, it’s usually a decimal pound. Keep in mind though that generally it’s going TJ be tougher to switch from a smaller unit to a larger one, since people like having that kind of precision. If we invest in making road signs display both miles and km, that will help the switch. The issue is that on highways all of the exits are numbered based on mile markers (how far away you are in miles from the start of the highway. So for the one near me, switching exits 1, 3, 5, and 9 to exits 1, 5, 8, and 15 would be very confusing. Meters can probably replace feet in the medium distances soon, like for many younger Americans 200m is more intuitive than 600ft (not an exact conversion, but the comparison would be unfair if it was). The biggest thing I think though for volume measurements will be the reduction in gas powered cars, as gallons are so ingrained in our system im that people will flip out if they see something at $0.85 on the price sign and pay $50 or more for a full tank of gas. These will all be slow transitions for the public and expensive transitions for the government? But it is possible.
@@metalpunk I vaguely remember it was tried in 1979. I was 2 and I remember people were upset thinking they were being cheated with gasoline. Pro tip: don’t try metrification during an energy crisis.
One way to think of American ("statute") miles in relation to kilometers is to understand that 80km is 49.7 miles, which can be rounded off to 50 miles. Therefore, 25mph is 40km/h and 120km/h is 75mph. Nautical miles are not just there to be obtuse. A nautical mile is a _minute_ of _latitude_ on a navigational chart, so (unlike the kilometer) the nautical mile is actually based on a useful distance, not just some arbitrary multiple of one dimension of a certain cubic volume of fresh water or some such other irrelevant factoid.
Well, Britain is completely crazy. We use Celsius (except for some old people), we drive in miles and miles per hour, we buy drinks and fuel in litres but still talk about miles per (Imperial) gallon, and our gallons are slightly bigger gallons, as you touched upon in the video. And heights are feet and inches, which I understand, yet somehow for weights I am happier with kilograms. We are mid-Atlantic, but I think slowly we are heading towards Europe and the rest of the world.
At least you are using A4 paper! 🙂 In Canada, I think things are a bit more advanced. Young people are counting in metric, except for body measures, which are still expressed in british units, for some reason. The biggest thing preventing a full conversion is that all industrial goods are sold using the imperial system, probably because of trade with our much bigger neighbour in the south. We also use US paper formats such as letter paper and sometimes that absurd "legal" format, both of which make no sense at all.
I think there are only two areas where US units might have the edge in everyday life: - Temperatures are that little bit more precise, so it's easier to judge how it's going to feel like once you're out. The 0 for freezing is very practical though, but the 100 for body temperature just shows the scale is adapted to the human body. Still can't wrap my head about Fahrenheits though - Small units for cooking like the teaspoon or the tablespoon have some advantages, since your unit is directly linked with your measurement tools. In non-imperial world, it makes things that little bit more of a fuss, but that's just as long as you don't have adapted tools. So that's a limited advantage too Otherwise, yeah, meters, kilometres... so much better.
I agree 100 per cent (a decimal concept, from the Latin per centum) with your pro-metric stance. My country, the United States, is in the worst possible situation. At this time, by official estimates, the U.S. is about 60 per cent converted from its "customary" system, with more conversion to metric units occurring every year. Our problem is that we are now "in medias res," stuck in transition, the worst possible situation. But metric use is growing, as you indicated. Product labels have metric values, so the U.S. "Customary" system can be disregarded. Digital thermometers can be set to display degrees Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, etc. The key is not to do conversions at all, but to think metric and disregard the customary units, much as thinking in Latin (as a goal) makes understanding easier than a strict grammar-translation process. BTW, your linguistic videos are fantastic, going far beyond even Allen, Sturtevant, and the rest. Your knowledge is impressive, far beyond any of the Classicists I know (including myself!).
The way some people talk, you'd think it's a binary situation and the US uses only imperial while almost every other country uses only metric. We (in the US) use imperial more often in our day-to-day lives, but we do use metric sometimes. For instance, if we buy a bottle of Mountain Dew at the convenience store, it's likely to be a liter or a two-liter. You can't get a quart bottle. So pretty much everyone here knows what a liter is, and other measurements like kilograms and centimeters are a bit less known, but most people have some idea roughly how big they are. The Celsius temperature scale is probably the one people are the least familiar with. Everyone is taught the metric system in elementary school, but a lot of people forget it from not using it. And as I've said before, no one uses the metric system for everything. The talk of speed limits in the video is the perfect example. Meters per second are the only metric unit of speed with an optional prefix for really fast or slow things. Does anyone set their speed limits in m/s? When I hear someone give their age in megaseconds or gigaseconds, then I'll believe someone is serious about switching entirely to metric.
Thanks for the comment, Martin. Plenty more linguistic and philology content coming this month, so I'm glad you like those. I concur as well with your assessment of our state in mediās rēs. My thinking is that we can each start using and thus gently encouraging our countrymen to become familiar with metric in ways like this video. Or perhaps more subtly. I also agree with the immersion concept. That's what I recommendede here: ua-cam.com/video/X98cIRlEI2k/v-deo.html
Hi chitlitlah, thanks for the comment. My video at this link is to help people acquire Celsius, which I believe is the easiest to master with the tricks I say here: ua-cam.com/video/X98cIRlEI2k/v-deo.html As for the metric units, meters per second is not the only metric unit of speed. You are talking about something very important, though, which are the seven SI base units: meters, seconds, moles, kilograms, amperes, candelas, kelvins. All other units in the metric system, like kilometers and hours, are derived from them, and are part of the complete metric system. Even though decimal time isn't going to happen any time (hehe) soon, hours are absolutely part of the metric system since they are based on the second, an SI base unit. The even more absurd part is that even the US customary measures are part of the metric system, since they're all defined from metric units, and have been for some time. So if I were to be a bit more honest in the video above, I could have highlighted this (as I did in the Celsius video from last year), and noted that we're already quite metricated; we have merely made life much much harder for ourselves by placing clumsy (as I see them) "customary" units on top of a much more elegant and ultimately, in my opinion, more useful system.
@@polyMATHY_Luke To me, metric prefixes such as kilo- don't prevent a unit from being metric because it's a power of ten which is the whole philosophy and advantage of the metric system. On the other hand, saying an hour is 3600 seconds doesn't seem very metric. The system loses it's advantage over the imperial system if it says a minute is 60 seconds, an hour is 60 minutes, a day is 24 hours, etc. But like you say, if an hour (defined as 3600 seconds) _is_ metric, then an inch (defined as 2.54 cm) is just as metric. If their speed limits are in metric, then so are ours since a mile is exactly 1609.344 meters.
@A. Nonymous I can't remember ever seeing a liquor bottle that wasn't metric and I buy a lot of booze. They're typically called half gallons (handles), fifths, and pints, but they're really 1.75L, 750mL, and 375mL. They don't even print the imperial measurement on the bottle most of the time. Add to that short list medicines. Pills are in mg and syrups are in mL. Generally, I agree with you though.
Gallons in the USA differ from Gallons everywhere else. Even Tons in the USA are incoherent with Tons everywhere else. Fahrenheit was based on the coldest temperature that was possible to achieve in Fahrenheit's laboratory at the time. 1m = 3 feet 3 inches.
I grew up with the old UK system but thankfully we learned the decimal system at school and when things changed in the early 70s all was simple. Untill I went to the USA for 3.333 years and was flumoxed by their different values to their Imperial system and the practice of measuring with Cups ! . As an astrologer who does complicated sums with 360 degrees and days divided into 24 hours I feel you could address the continued use of the Sumarian system for counting time which has now become ubiquitous world wide
Even the metric system is not ideal at one point, if we want to use large numbers, some countries use the short scale, others the long scale. So I often have to look for the origin of the information, whether they meant a billion as a milliard(10^9), or whether it is a billion(10^12).
I got my driver's license in Canada in the 90s. I saw it had kg on them and since I was in wrestling and the weight classes were in kg I knew my weight in kg, so when they asked me my weight I just said "54 kg" She looked confused and asked "How many lbs?" "120.." And then she inputted that. A couple months later my license arrives in the mail and it says 54 kg
I am here to lobby for a return to 12 pence per shilling, 20 shillings per pound for US currency. LOL. You're right it's what we're familiar with - but I don't think the metric system's ubiquity is so much due to it being "logical" as much as it's due to enlightenment revolutionary governments turning over Europe. The metric units that ordinary people used multiple times a day (time/calendar) got reverted as soon as it was feasible, and thank goodness. I did live in France for a year, but I never felt like there was any benefit to it; everything I had occasion to measure just felt like the units were all out of scale - either 100s of something or hundredths of something. You never got to measure in the "one to 20" range. And one _could_ - I have no idea why decimeters aren't used; that'd make a lot of sense and remove part of my resistance.
Hm. People, 15-20dm tall, 15dm long table, 20dm tall door. You're on to something. Those sound ridiculously convenient. Decameters, too: City block 10-20dam, a short street, 20-30dam
a gallon was originally made because that was the size of the 1 gallon wine bottle 1 family of 4 required for 1 week of meals. I wish I was making that up. the volume metric system is a decimal system that uses base 10 decimal system with liters being the base... but the US system is a fractional system with 1 gallon wine bottles as the base.... (examples below) a half-gallon is 1/2 of a gallon a quart is 1/2 of a half-gallon or 1/4 of a gallon a pint is 1/2 a quart or 1/8 of a gallon a cup is 1/2 of a pint, or 1/16 of a gallon 1 fluid-ounce is 1/8 of a cup, 1/16 if a pint, 1/32 of a quart, 1/64 of a half gallon, or 1/128 of a gallon. with temperature it works more day to day because the temperature in US ranges from 0F to 100F between january and july. of course it sometimes can reach -20Fto 120F (but -20 sounds really freaking cold and it is... and 120 sounds really freaking hot and it is...) from day to day 0-100 is way easier to keep track of then -17C to 37C depending on season. maybe if we are trying to boil water or make ice Celsius is way easier to keep track of. but fahrenheit is based on weather/climate/air temperature rather than water temperature. with distance it goes back to the Romans kinda. 1 foot is the size of a 6ft tall Roman mans shoe. or a romans shoe is 1/6 his height. inch came from old english word ynce or 1/12th of a roman foot. a yard is 3 roman feet. now for a mile it gets more complicated.. a mile is 1000 roman paces ... which is 2000 strides or steps.... where they walked 2000 "steps" away and it came out to ~5280 feet. at 31.5 inch strides / 12 inches in a foot x 2000 strides. and an acre is an area approximately how much land 2 oxen dragging a plow can plow in a day.
On temperature, I opine from real experience that Celsius is quite a bit easier for day to day: ua-cam.com/video/X98cIRlEI2k/v-deo.html If it weren't the Swedes and Finns would have switched to Farhenheit long ago, don't you think?
@@polyMATHY_Luke As a Finn, 30 is already unbearably hot, so whenever people cite temps in Fahrenheit I have no clue whether I need a jacket or sunscreen because they're all different variations of hell by the number anyway.
8:30 A 2x4 piece of construction lumber is actually 1 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches. Something having to do with lumber yards using saw blades that are 1/2 inch wide if I'm not mistaken...
As a language precisionist (I just made that up!) you should note that US customary, like all measurement systems is a metric. I know, everyone calls the French metric, now the SI, The Metric System. I am a scientists and do not like the SI for several reasons. The main one is the shear stupidity and revolutionary zeal that led to a new basic unit if length instead of a standardized yard. The yard and meter only differ by 10% (not 28%) but it has been a major pain for everyone. All they had to do was create new divisions for the length of the yard and use the silly names that chose with the meter. As you know, any leaned person at the time would recognize the Latin versus Greek prefixes for things bigger or smaller than a base unit. But that distinction is not known by many today. And of course the multi-syllable names that are easily misheard should have followed the style of the Imperial metric with single syllable names that sound noting like each other. As for non-subjective differences, factors of 10 are too large for convenient use. Instruments other than volume controls have dials with positions of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50,..... in order to have usable precision. The reason 12 inches and 3 feet is useful is rooted in rational arithmetic, which is perfect. 12 is as you say commensurate with 2, 3, 4, and 6. Rational arithmetic is also perfect on computers with no roundoff. OTOH 1/10 is impossible to represent exactly in binary. If the meter were a yard or if the common units were redefined to fit the meter, then using both rational and French would be easy and very useful. A most unfortunate missed opportunity by the intellectuals of the time. And defining the meter as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the pole? When they could have picked any of the standard yards as the reference? This is an ultimate in egghead nincompoopery.
I think F is better for weather, and C for most else, and find decrees C too large, so prefer the precision of half degrees C. I use my maps in km, one which program very frequently mis-translates speed limits into km for me. Happily, I known that 35mph=60km/h not 40hm/h which equals 25mph. Then there's the issue of sales tax rather than VAT here in the US, so where I live, food is price plus 1%, non-food is price plus 6%, and restaurants meals are price plus 6-10% depending on where I'm dining, and no tax at all on prescription nor non-prescription drugs. Once, in New Hampshire, a clerk tried to talk me out of buying a brownie with nuts in it, as the luxury tax applied to the nuts. I invited on the brownie with nuts, as I don't mind paying tax, as that's part of living in a civilized society.
@@ericbarlow6772 Fahrenheit is useless for weather; there's no inbuilt point of reference. With Celsius you know 0 is freezing and 100 is boiling, and almost everything in daily life relates well to this range. Meanwhile in fahrenheit, water freezes at like 22.245957821 and boils at 135.7889752 or some shit, the whole system was devised around the freezing point of ammonia or something irrelevant like that.
@@digitalbrentable no it’s actually one of the areas it can be better than Celsius. How often do you use the upper end of the scale for weather? Not often. Scales are good for measuring what’s in between the upper and lower bounds. Since Fahrenheit is between the freezing point and blood temperature, it’s more intuitive as a feels like scale. Celsius is great for cooking because it uses the freezing and boiling points of water. While you can use either scale for anything you want, keep in mind what they were designed for. Besides, Kelvin is the actual SI unit so in reality the debate is moot.
Hi and thanks for the comment, I appreciate it. Pretty much all thermostats allow one to select temperature in Celsius in decimals of a degree, thus on my thermostat I can select 20.5 degrees or 20.0 or 19.5 etc. Given that this is the basis of almost all thermostats in Celsius around the world, the result is that Celsius in practical usage is actually more precise than Fahrenheit thermostats, which usually don't bother with decimal degrees.
According to the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States is now about 60 per cent converted to the metric system since the passage of the 1988 Omnibus and Trade Competitiveness Act. As of 2021, it is estimated that 30% of U.S. businesses, mostly the larger ones, are metricated completely or almost completely. The U.S. is metricated completely or almost completely in the following areas: (1) pharmaceuticals (grams, milliliters, etc.) (2) lighting (lumens, kelvin, etc.) (3) nuclear power (sieverts) (4) electricity and magnetism (watts, volts, kilowatt hours, milliamperes, etc.) (5) alcoholic beverages (liters, milliliters) (6) automobiles, bicycles, and their parts (built to metric units) (7) science (8) medicine (9) pharmaceuticals (10) computers and electronics (11) solar power (e.g., kilowatt hours, watts per square meter) (12) time (seconds, etc.) (13) Olympic and other sports events (meters, kilograms, etc.) (14) food and nutrition (grams. milligrams, calories, etc.) (15) radio and television (kilohertz, megahertz, etc.) (16) bottled water and soft drinks (liters, milliliters, etc.) (17) weather (millibars) (18) radioactivity (sievert, gray) (19) hardware (partially) (20) automobiles (mostly) (21) climatology (degrees Celsius) (22) military, especially the U.S. Army (23) aviation (24) civil engineering (partly) (25) architecture (partly) (26) farm equipment (27) meteorology (28) space science (29) electronics (30) optometry (31) undoubtedly others not listed here
In my country we use inches for nails and construction stuff(but we also use metric, like, we don't measure surfaces in cubic feet or heights in feet) , and we use teaspoons and table spoons and cups for cooking. For distances we use kilometers and when on foot we use some olds obsolete measurements that aren't really standarised like a cuadra, you'll get a exact measurement if you google it but it isn't really used like that colloquially. Farenheits are just nonsensical to me, Miles per hour and such I don't really care, we use kilometers of course but I don't get the hate on that one and I also don't get the hate on spoons and cups for measurements in the kitchen, it really doesn't take much to notice that cooking is based on proportions so as long as you use the same cup and spoons (even if it isn't the exact size a cup (unit) is set as) for everything on the recipee you'll get a good result. In agriculture, colloquially people commonly measure things in what they are stored in and that's not standardised either so if you to a wet market and buy a sack of potatos you could be getting 20 or 22 or maybe 24 kilos and if you buy a fruit crate it's more of the same. Of course, it's not like you can't just ask for it to be measured and they tend to be similar enough to the point where it doesn't matter.
one pet peeve I have with metric is people who write mililiters "ml" instead of the correct "mL" I guess the correct solution is to switch to all SI units, volume in m^3, speed in m/s, and temperature in Kelvin
They are both correct and ml is much much more common (I scare to insert link as could be blocked by youtube, but just look correspondent article in wiki). Moreover there is a convention that capital letters are for the units formed from names of scientist (despite the unit itself should be small, e.g. newton has symbol N).
@@alaksiejstankievicx fun fact, the litre is named after Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, a French pre-revoulutionary glass blower, who also has a daughter naned Mille at least according to a U-Waterloo from April 1st
How many popular songs use the metric system? Few, if any, I trow. But numerous pop songs use miles, e.g., Walk A Mile in My Shoes, A Thousand Miles Away, I Can See for Miles, Eight Miles High, Moonlight Mile, 500 Miles, etc. When it comes to pop/rock music, the metric system just can’t compete. “If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone, you can hear the whistle blow a 160.9 kilometers…”? Nah.
Hehe, but those are all popular songs in English, and the vast majority of popular songs are American in order, and after they British, where they also use Imperial units. Have you researched popular songs beyond the English speaking world?
@@polyMATHY_Luke Popular songs, no. No reason to do so. But classical, absolutely. Being of Italian ancestry myself, I’m especially fond of opera: Puccini, Verdi, Vivaldi, Rossini. And I hold in highest regard the late Italian composer and conductor, Ennio Morricone (1928 - 2020), one of the most prolific and versatile composers of the 20th century. He composed and recorded the sound tracks for all three of Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns," starring Clint Eastwood. He also composed the score for "Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968). Morricone has received two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, five BAFTAS, and an Academy Honorary Award for “magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” Molto buone!
In defense of the U.S. system The distances for smaller measurements are often based on the human body, i.e. the inch was based on King David of Scotland's thumb, so we can approximate it with our thumb. The foot was Henry VIII's foot, so we can approximate it with ours. A cubit is the length of the forearm-ish (roughly 18 inches). The span is the hand spread out (roughly 9 inches). The distances are less arbitrary than the metric systems. Miles, though, still befuddles me. I don't get it. For weight and volume, the divisibility is more useful when dividing out the units into common fractions as you said, the difficulty in the decimal format comes from the inefficiency of a base-ten numeral system. I would personally advocate for base 12. For temperature, I think that both sides have practical uses. Celsius divides useful temperatures into sets of ten. Fahrenheit has a continuum from 0 to 100 that relates inversely to the amount of clothing you need. In summary, U.S. distance is good for rough approximation on the fly, U.S. weight and volume are good for common fractions, and temperature is based somewhat on preference. Please feel free to reply with counterpoints.
Indeed miles weren't standardised in England and Wales until the reign of Elizabeth I (Scotland, had its own 'Scots mile' that wasn't abolished until later). So you had an English mile, which would have been 2.1 km (and even that varied between different areas of England), You had the Welsh mile, which was 3 miles, 1760 yards. And you had the Irish mile, which was 2,240 yards. In 1593, Parliament passed the Weights and Measures Act, which did away with the various English miles and the Welsh mile, and introduced a standardised, or statute mile. The act stated: "A Mile shall contain eight Furlongs, every Furlong forty Poles, and every Pole shall contain sixteen Foot and an half." The statute mile therefore contained 5,280 feet or 1,760 yards." That's the mile that's used in both British imperial and American Customary Units. The Irish mile continued to be used for quite a while after that, and there was some residual use of it until the 19th and 20th century. In Scotland, the Scots mile was longer than the English mile- It comprised 8 (Scots) furlongs divided into 320 falls or faws (Scots rods). It varied from place to place but the most accepted equivalencies are 1,976 Imperial yards (1.123 statute miles or 1.81 km). It was legally abolished three times: first by a 1685 Act of the Scottish Parliament, again by the 1707 Act of Union with England, and finally by the Weights and Measures Act of 1824. It had continued in use as a customary unit through the 18th century but had become obsolete by its final abolition. Statute miles are, incidentally, still used throughout the UK to this day, both (exclusively) on road signs, on milometers in cars (where they appear alongside km) and generally as a method of measuring long distances (although kilometres are used too).
Also it was Henry I, rather than Henry VIII that was said to have standardised the length of a foot, based on the length of his arm, in around 1101 (that's probably apocryphal though, and is really just tradition). But certainly, by the c. 1300 Act concerning the Composition of Yards and Perches, (traditionally credited to either Edward I or II), the statute foot was a different measure, exactly 10/11 of the old, or 'Belgic" foot that had been previously used.
@@Stormageddon571 and yeah, being from basically the last generation in the UK that was taught both alongside each other (I was born in 1984), I can see the advantages of both too.
I personally don't find the feet and the miles and the inches and the gallons confusing or cumbersome. I know most conversions by heart. What I do consider really messed up is the use of fractions for dividing up things, particularly when the denominator keeps changing! It's not immediately obvious that 3/32 is smaller than 1/8. On the other hand, 0.094 vs 0.125 is very easy to read and place in the correct order.
There's a video of the VSauce guys answering 100 most commonly googled questions. Question #96 was "how many ounces in a gallon" and those supposedly smart people, brought up in the American system, answered confidently "64".
This is a useful video. I use rule of thumb conversions when reading journals and the like, but I'm in no hurry to get off the imperial system. It's not because it's better, but simply because it's what I, and my neighbors, know. None of these reforms take place from the ground up but from the top down. Most people just won't find the utility to forcibly convert themselves. This is for the exact same reason we've never really gotten off of Sumerian time. We still have 24 hours (two twelve hour segments) and divide it into 60 minutes. This isn't decimal, and it won't be fore the foreseeable future. Even top-down reform can't overcome the momentum the Sumerians put into place. For the same reason, I'll stick with my imperial units unless I leave the US. The benefit just isn't worth the hassle. :)
In the UK we learned the 12 times table until quite recently due to there being 240 pence in a pound until 1971. It actually makes more sense to have 240 pennies to the pound than 100 pence as 240 has more factors so the maths is more simple. I could divide 240 pence by, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 30, 60 and 80. I may have missed one or two. 100 pence is divisible by only 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50. Yet young people tell me decimal (metric) money makes more sense and makes the maths easier?
Was sharing recipes with a friend in Europe and after explaining how you determine which type of ounce, they wanted to know if we were crazy. Then they asked, if you melt the chocolate, do you have to switch which ounce to use? Yep, we use Crazy Units.
As much as I love the unit prefixes, I never liked the claim metric is based on the interrelated nature of physical dimensions, since they’re ultimately about as arbitrary as ACU. The meter was based on an inaccurate estimate of the Earth’s circumference, then that mistaken measure had a very arbitrary fraction of a lightsecond (itself defined by the second, which is based on a very arbitrary amount of cessium radiation activity) assigned as its definition. Till 2011, the kilogram was defined as “the weight of this chunk of platinum” (a chunk of platinum that shrank over time no less!). Looking at it from the other end, since ACU are defined by being equal to metric units, ACU are, in fact, just as defined by that fraction of a lightsecond/amount of energy/etc. as metric units are! Clearly we need a system of units based on atoms of lead or gold
They are indeed based on the conversion of physical dimensions: mass derived from volume derived from length. Hence the ability to immediately determine volume from length and vice versa
And to confuse matters more there's a difference between "nominal" and "actual lumber sizes. So a 2"x4" is actually 1.5"x3.5". There is a reasonable explanation for how this came about, but not for why we still do it.
I tried the Celsius temp convert thing which worked until winter. In a Midwest Winter, my gear changes every 5F degrees, I could internalize the summer temp fine, but kept finding myself overdressing instinctively in response to the negative sign until I changed my device temp back to Farenheit, possibly because polymathy only took the scale down to zero C and that's shorts and hoodie weather if there's no wind. Also I have serious trouble conceptualizing measurement in general. For example, in the closing argument - .4 of a mile means nothing to me because I have serious trouble picturing / conceptualizing distance. A mile literally means nothing to me, but neither really does 500 yards. 100 yards and below is meaningful because after years of marching band, I do understand the length of a football field mostly, but practically, 5 yards is the biggest measurement I can reliably replicate / understand without a measuring tool. I have tried to learn metric, but given my difficulty in conceptualizing measurement, it's been an uphill battle. I have body / concrete equivalents for standard, but not for metric. I have tried to find them for metric, but haven't had much luck. As such, I cannot picture the metric measurements which makes them really hard for me to use. Metric users, what approximants were you taught as a young child? What is the metric equivalent to 'two fingers is an inch' and a 'finger' is a fluid oz, and so on? That's what I really need to learn to metric.
Now that you have brought it up, it would make more sense to have sub-dollar units be non-decimal-based. This is how the Romans did it and they had just about the most economically successful nation at their height. The British Empire also had a similar system of various non-decimal monetary subdivisions and their economic might conquered the world! The penny, as it is, is utterly useless. The only just reason to keep it as the current system is that the federal reserve will inflate away the useful value in all dollar subdivisions before a new system could be legislated. The fact is, regardless of math skills or literacy, the vast majority of everyday business of getting on with life is not academic but holistic. Small counts are easier and faster to intuit than larger, at it is less "ram" to move around. In a nation that actually conducts business instead of just thinking about doing it, such an ease of calculation is much appreciated. An ideal situation would be dual systems for most things with an ease of translation between them - usable both holistically and academically. Dealing in both Imperial and metric is a sorry excuse for a solution, as they do not translate well, and I understand why many foolishly advocate capitulating to that farce, that sterile, inhuman, disgustingly French measurement system. I understand why, but you're still foolish.
Since I enjoy a friendly debate about this subject, I shall respond. "Now that you have brought it up, it would make more sense to have sub-dollar units be non-decimal-based. This is how the Romans did it and they had just about the most economically successful nation at their height. The British Empire also had a similar system of various non-decimal monetary subdivisions and their economic might conquered the world!" If this system really is better, then why did the Brits go to a decimal system of currency in 1971, much to their economic benefit? Given the US's extraordinary economic power, its decimalization seems not to be harming it. Thus, in the spirit of debate, I'd say your idea is easily dismissed. "The fact is, regardless of math skills or literacy, the vast majority of everyday business of getting on with life is not academic but holistic. Small counts are easier and faster to intuit than larger, at it is less "ram" to move around. In a nation that actually conducts business instead of just thinking about doing it, such an ease of calculation is much appreciated." I reiterate what I said in the video: you advocate some sort of perceived naturalness or usefulness for US units, but the only reason you feel this way is because they're familiar. You say " In a nation that actually conducts business," meaning that the US is a mighty economic powerhouse. With this I strongly agree, and it is of course self-evident. But our not using metric has not been any aid to our economic success. More likely it has been a hindrance. You write, "such an ease of calculation is much appreciated." You seem to be arguing for the metric system, which is objectively easier by definition in all calculations. You describe the metric system as "that farce, that sterile, inhuman, disgustingly French measurement system" - but I would like to remind you that it was Thomas Jefferson's idea first, his invention. My assessment, if you will allow me, is that your reasoning, rather than from any data or test scenarios, in fact comes from a mix of subjective familiarity and patriotism. Now, I'm a patriot too, and I have over a decade of military service to back up that claim. And one of our great virtues as Americans is our inventiveness, our innovation, our way of finding better ways to do things. Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so; thus it really is odd that we have not followed through on the innovation we in fact were instrumental in developing, and in fact accepted, as the US is actually now, right now, on the metric system. Thanks for the debate and friendly conversation.
@@polyMATHY_Luke >why did the Brits go to a decimal system of currency in 1971 I don't know but what they did after they fell from their status of economic hegemon is almost irrelevant given that they had this system before and during the entire time they were the economic engine of the world. My first point was that such a system is not a catastrophic or even major issue given that such massive economic blocks already successfully utilized them for centuries. Also, the US, for much of its existence, did not have a national bank, and no national bank notes, ergo the currency was backed and printed by private banks. As for how many of those notes had thirds or fourths denominations, we might not be able to say except to look at the trends of national currencies at the time, which often had these sorts of fractional denominations. Our rise from backwater to world-class power in the late 19th century and early 20th century, primarily using this system, shows that such a system is not inherently a weakness. I am establishing historical evidence of non-delinquency as foundation for my next arguments. I can't very well make an argument without ground to stand on. Oh and the decades of greatest economic growth in our history happened before the federal reserve was instituted, so this point of "the US not being harmed by decimal fractions" can't be substantiated by axiom. >the only reason you feel this way is because they're familiar. No. The reason I believe it to be superior, for much of but not all of daily life, is because of the facts of cognition. Your mind, so it is reckoned, can easily hold only about 7 to 8 digits at any one instant and can do operations on maybe one or two in the same instant. When you treat your mind as a computer, as a number cruncher, this is the fact of its nature at its smallest individuated time intervals. Decimal alone forces you to pay the "time tax" of extra precision even when almost none is required. It's akin to the extra programming complexity of manually calculating fixed vs floating point number operations, it shows up in everything you use it for. Having to calculate multiples of costs in decimal for an extra half second keeps the mind from the actually important and subjective economic decision of "how much do I actually value such goods". More simply, it keeps the mind thinking more of "can I buy it" rather than "should I buy it". Multiply that loss of useful time over hundreds of millions of people a day, maybe a few times a day, and you end up with many lifetimes of collected life wasted every year. And you must either eat the cost or lose the precision, which many people simply do, and this loss of precision has its own time cost in the associated loss of opportunity. This is one reason among many why farmers markets often deal primarily in whole numbers or very simple fractions. Apart from that, my point about the cognitive speed in reasoning in simple fractions over simple decimal, the "Imperial" system has many units which are similar in size to very human things or multiples of such things. The prime example of this is the foot but, also, the mile is similar to 1000 paces and an inch is similar to the length of the tip of a finger. This makes it very easy to intuit and, as I mentioned before, very quick to calculate with on the fly. This is stark contrast to metric where the primary unit, the meter, is far too long to reason with on the body, which is how one intuits distance most easily. Furthermore, you often have to reason exclusively in these multisyllabic, prefixed words derived from deci- centi- and mili-, which is a whole other can of worms and yet another mental handicap to reasoning about a given problem. >it was Thomas Jefferson's idea I'm sorry but this is just a misrepresentation of reality. The metric system as we know it it today, which is primarily awful from it's base unit of measurement being based on Earth (not the humans that actually have to use it), has it's historical roots firmly in France, not the heavily (at the time) anglo-centric USA or Jefferson. That said, Jefferson's system wasn't bad. He used the foot as the fundamental unit of measurement so it wouldn't have been too terrible. I have some issues with it (specifically my aforementioned desire for a FUNCTIONAL dual system and retention of a mile as approx. 1000 paces) but it's leagues better than our current system and the metric system alone (and yes I did know that we technically already incorporated the metric system into ours). I get that your military service trained you to think in metric but it just isn't a natural cultural outgrowth. It's like if some government mandated some conlang as a second national language. Past all the (I think) objectively valid reasons I just gave against it, it also feels fake to me. I find it slightly disturbing that so many wish so heavily to distance their minds from their bodies. I disagree wholeheartedly with this premise that disintegrating measures with the human body has no ill effects. It's a very "head with the chicken cut off" mentality. I'm not questioning your patriotism, nor would I even think it even relevant to this discussion. I don't think a measurement system should imply loyalties to any institution save reason and utility. I wouldn't take such criticism seriously - it is, at best, playful banter and, at worst, a patently losing argument. I mean, why would I, as an American below the 39th have nationalist loyalty to a system primarily incepted by an English King and his Parliament? We fought and won two wars to be rid of their rule and now we aren't patriotic for using their weights and measures? It's nonsense. I realize many people hold this inane view, and you had little means to know who exactly does, but I am not one of them. I partially identify with the emotions of such people, but I also do with the emotions of flat earthers, in their skepticism of science, and yet I still think the the world is a sphere. Such is the folly of listening to your gut but not your brain.
The thing that shocked me when I went to the US was the difference between miles and feet, when the navigator switched from saying "in a quarter of a mile turn right" to in 800 feet turn right, I was just WTF? I'm used to the navigator switch from kilometres and meters in a sane way, where saying 1/4 of a kilometre is obvious that is 250 meters, the same is not true from miles and feet. Also the navigator some time did display it like 0.1 miles and the other in foots! How do you don't find it confusing? In metric you just move the decimal point around, isn't it more simple? Another thing that I find confusing is that it's not obvious to imagine a quantity, since with metric you know that 1kg is equivalent of 1 litre of water that has the volume of a cube of 10x10x10cm. So when you say about a litre of gasoline you more or less imagine the weight it has (even if it's not the same of the one of water, approximately) and the volume that it takes. How do you do that with gallons?
I find what you said about GPS navigation in miles and feet INSANELY confusing as well. I think it's idiotic. I can't conceptualize it, whereas in km and meters it's super clear to me. My phone's navigation always calls out in metric, which I prefer for this reason, among others.
The inch is a particularly handy measurement for me, since my thumb is pretty close to one inch across, so I can measure inches just by placing one thumb in front of the other.
Ooh, has anyone mentioned in the comments how a lot of the symbols for imperial measurements are of Latin origin? Like 'lb' coming from an abbreviation for the Latin 'Libra pondo'?
Will never give up my 9/16 or 11/32 wrenches! Imperial is way better for temps according to humans. 100 is hot and 0 is freeze all your bits off cold. Miles are cooler than klicks. Lifting lbs is more satisfying than lifting kg since the number is bigger. I'll only argue for the adoption of height in metric so the 6' cutoff in dating is obscured haha. But really, I think a majority of Americans are familiar enough with metric to the point where it's not an issue.
The measuring tape and the whole familiarity topic reminded me of how here in Europe I see multi-scale measuring tapes, and multi-scale thermometers (despite the mainland having been metric since before 1900), whereas whenever I see American clips of measuring tapes they're always inches-feet only. Not sure about thermometers :D But I bet if the tools surrounding people exposed them to metric units even like that, they'd be much less alien to them.
I do advocate for extending the life of the penny by switching cents to pence. 100 cents = $1 = 144 pence 50 cents = half dollar = 72 pence = 2 quarters 25 cents = quarter dollar = 36 pence The only change is a dime needs to = 12 pence 12 dimes = $1 This change is long overdue as the cost of copper results in the US losing money with every penny produced, even with using zinc coins plated in thin layer of copper.
3:40, that may be the case if metric wasn't mandated by governments. As it is, you can't use this as evidence to refute any claims based on general use or adoption. Ask a Canadian what they prefer. The US and Imperial systems of measurement have advantages that aren't overcome by decimalization.
some things are common outside America, i've heard feet when discussing altitude on European planes before, and the whole tablespoon thing is not that uncommon, most people i know have the measuring spoons in their kitchen, doesn't really matter what it is in metric, just get the measuring spoons and there you go lol
When guessing is sufficient for everyday life, the imperial system will do, as any system would do, no need to change. But when it comes to to combining different units like weight and volume or speed and energy and precision is required then there will be trouble. But most Americans never do this, so why change?
i remember some NASA disasters due to metric system mistakes , hows that possible is easier to use metric system in electronic systems (i am an electronic engineer...).....
I know every theme in Die Zauberflöte like the back of my hand, but until just now I never listened with attention to the Canadian National Anthem. With the clue you gave me, I instantly recognised Marsch der Priester, the opening music to the second act: ua-cam.com/video/OvKAsZxI9cQ/v-deo.html This is really cool; I had no idea. Our neighbors to the north have always had a special place in my heart, so this is another reason for me to appreciate Canada. Thanks so much!
@@polyMATHY_Luke Bingo! "Oh Canada" has always sounded familiar to me without knowing how until I discovered that on a UA-cam channel a few months ago. I am not a fan of opera in general (too many spoken words) but "Die Zauberflöte", "Figaro" and "Don Giovanni" (which refers to Figaro too, do you know when?) are my references. Those are just divine.
I do know when! During the dinner scene when the dinner music plays, whereupon "Non più andrai" (the first Italian song I ever learned by heart, incidentally) plays, and the Don says it all sounds too familiar hahaha.
Ok but now we need a video explaining how to best conceptualize the measurements of a stadion, a parasang, a Roman mile, a talent, a fathom, a cubit, a mna, a league, a schoenus, etc.
A great suggestion.
@@polyMATHY_Luke isnt a parasang in xenophon at least how far they marched in an hour on the terran?
A fathom is about the size of the average human male, a talent is about the weight of a large bag of concrete or a little less than the weight of two 40lb bags, a stadion is 185 meters or 1/10 of a nautical mile. A parasang is the same length as a double stacked train in the U.S. A Roman mile is 1,000 military steps with the left foot and doesn't seem to be a set distance. A cubit is about the length of many windshield wiper blades or just a little shorter than the length of 4 soda cans although there is no set measurement. A mina is 1/6 of a talent and some bags of dog food come in that weight. A league is not a set distance and was about how far a person can walk in an hour. Schoenus is based on a place and not a distance although various writers have used it to mean a distance, but that distance isn't agreed upon.
Bonus:
Perhaps the most important one for tourists is that $5.00 in stores is never just $5.00. It's always $5.00 + ?%
where ?% is the local sales tax. I learned this the hard way 😂
And in restaurants, it's $5.00 + 10-20 %...
@@mytube001 knowing the city rules is important. we visited a friend in Nebraska a few months ago. we went to one of the downtown restaurants in Omaha. we knew about the tipping culture, that's fine and no big deal. but we were a little confused how they can get way wih charging a "convenience fee" of 2% on top of the price + tip? seriously Omaha what's wrong with you. they didn't even do that stupid crap in California or New York.
not where i live :P i just hand them a $5 bill and walk out. but yeah sales tax is common in almost every state...
@@TheJesusOfNazerith huh, I guess in your case it's $5.00 + 0% then ;)
Having the tax not hidden in the price lets the populace see with every purchase what their tax burden is. When you lay down your 5 euro note and walk out, you're not walking out with €5 worth of merchandise if that includes a VAT. If you stop to think about it, maybe you know what that tax is, but I bet you rarely stop to think about it.
I'm an Englishwomen in her 60s, so I can think in both metric and imperial, except for temperature. I can only think in celsius now. If I'm running short distances, I think in kilometres. If I'm running long distances (or driving) I think in miles. If I'm cooking, I have old recipes in pounds and ounces and new recipes in grammes. I can cope with both. If I'm telling people how tall I am, I tell them in feet and inches, but I can cope with my weight in stones and pounds or in kilos. If I'm talking about paper, I work in A1, A2, A3 etc. American measures bemuse me.
6:06 correction: you would have to add 50% onto the mile value to get 30 km, but to get from 30 km to 20 miles you have to subtract 33% or a third. Subtracting 50% would get you just 15 miles
You misunderstood. It’s a difference of 50% from the target. Your way works too, but I was trying to keep it conceptually simple by keeping the target the core reference frame.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I understood what you meant, you just said it wrong in the video making it potentially confusing for people who dont already know what exactly is meant
You’re right; I retract my statement
@@polyMATHY_Luke I got confused too. It isn't clear in the video!
I mean that's basic understanding of percentages, it might be better to use ratios instead of percents added or taken away in this case one relative to the other is 1.5/1 or 150% percent the other would be 1/1.5 aka 2/3s or 66.66666 ...%
In the UK, and I'm not making this up, generally, measuring things goes like this:
What are you measuring?
Speed?
Miles.
Distance?
If it's a long distance, and you're jogging, kilometers.
If it's a long distance, and you're not jogging, miles.
If it's a short distance, metres, or feet and inches. Whichever you're more comfortable with (I often use both interchangeably).
Temperature? Degrees centigrade (I can quite honestly say I've never measured anything in Fahrenheit in my life).
Weight?
If you're weighing a person, stones, pounds and ounces.
If it's not a person, kilogrammes and grammes, and metric tons.
Volume?
If it's beer, pints.
If it's not beer, but it's not milk either, litres.
If it's milk, but it's vegan milk, also litres
If it's any other type of milk, pints.
We've been officially metric since 1965, but in practice, we've sort of mish-mashed the two together in a system that somehow works and people are, oddly, not confused by.
What an interesting mix.
I knew about the UK using miles, so at least US speed limits and distances should be familiar to a Brit. It just feels that the USA is outdated by continuing to rely on other imperial measures like Fahrenheit, though; few countries other than the US extensively use Fahrenheit, and no major countries do.
(I remember once seeing a movie on Lifetime that had a British exchange student as a character, and the dialogue said that he should/would be using kilometers. I knew that was very wrong; in the back of my mind, I made fun of the scriptwriters and editors for this oversight...)
Australia is like this but a step closer to metric. Only your grandparents know how long a mile is or how heavy 6 stone and 10 pounds is (I just pulled those numbers out of my arse, but I honestly don't know: I think stones are multiple kilos each, not too many though - pounds are like half a kilo - so my guess is that 6 stone and 10 pounds is about 35 kilo). If you smoke weed, you know how much an ounce is, otherwise not likely. Humans are still measured in feet and inches, especially other humans, but you know your own height in cm. Packaged beer is in millilitres, but the amount of beer you order at the pub is highly regional/dialectical/customary (in general you're more likely to be drinking pots/middies/schooners/handles/half-pints than pints, lest your beverage becomes warm and flat in the heat. Old fellas in hotter areas often drink ponies (quarter pints) for maximum refreshment. Milk is in litres. Also it's 'litres' and not 'liters' for us too.
@@digitalbrentable I wouldn't be able to tell you what my weight is in metric, or my height.
But if I were to weigh say an object, I would use kilogrammes, and the same if I were to for example, measure a room; I'd use metres.
It's literally that engrained into everyone's collective psyche.
Mind you, I think younger people (and I'm 38) have a tendency to use metric a bit more, with older people leaning more towards imperial.
@Dr Gazza the weird thing in the UK is that we've been officially metric since 1965, but the way it was implemented was done in such a half-arsed way, we basically ended up with the mish-mash of a 'system' we have now.
I could be just talking out of my arse, but I suspect the difference in uptake lies in a cultural difference between Brits and Australians. In many respects we're more similar than we are different, but having lived in both countries I would speculate that people in the UK are more regionally distinct in a way that is often expressed in a kind of stubborn pride. Whereas Australia is governmentally more centralised and culturally more homogenous - the differences in accent and custom between cities thousands of kilometres apart are less than those of villages mere miles apart in the UK (let alone between the member states of the UK). As such, when the government of Australia implements some kind of national reform it's not as effectively resisted by entrenched local cultures rooted in identity.
I’m a bit more familiar with metric thanks to working in a hospital here in NYC that used metric for weights, lengths, temperature, and volumes. I worked in a neonatal unit so metric was a lot more precise for working with premature babies who might weigh only 600 grams.
Very cool! That’s important work too
@@polyMATHY_Luke I was very fortunate. I loved my work. I worked in the same neonatal unit for 47 years before retiring in October 2020.
Metric is pretty much required in the medical field thanks to a measurement called a mole. A mole uses Avagadro’s number and makes chemical reactions down to the molecule really accurate. For example, a mole of Hydrogen is its atomic weight in grams. This makes things like the saline solutions in IV drips much more safe.
@@ericbarlow6772 I remember Avogadro’s number well from chemistry class. 6.02 X 10 to the 23rd power. Thankfully, we didn’t have to do that when figuring out medications at work!!
@@cak8132 lol. Yeah it’s mostly used in the pharmaceutical industry to ensure each tablet or IV bag has the exact same amount of ingredients for safety and efficacy.
3:44 A simple, but quite accurate, approximation to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius:
[°C] ≈ ([°F]-30)/2
(Subtract 30 degrees from the “American” temperature, then divide by 2)
The correct formula is [°C] = ([°F]-32)*5/9
but this one is easier to do by mind and doesn’t diverge significantly.
We were taught multiply by 2 and add 27 for Farenheit to C but also that this only works for above zero temp
I was expecting more people to compliment Luke's gorgeous moustache. Great video by the way, as always.
Kind of you.
I find the Fibonacci sequence quite useful for converting between miles and kilometres when it comes to shorter distances. If a distance in kilometres is a Fibonacci number (e.g. 8) , then it is the previous Fibonacci number in miles (e.g. 5) , and a distance in miles (e.g. 8) is the following Fibonacci number in kilometres (e.g. 13). You can also say Fibonacci numbers times 10 (80 km/h = 50 mph). Even if the distance in question is not a Fibonacci number, it is the same percentage of the next Fibonacci number (e.g. 4 miles is 80% of 5 miles) as the value in the other system is a percentage of the corresponding Fibonacci number (80% of 8 = 0,8 x 8 = 6,4 kilometres).
I can't take credit for this, but I don't remember where I saw it first.
The mi/km conversion factor is almost exactly phi, the Golden Ratio or around 1.618. This means, if you see a Fibonacci number of miles, the next Fibonacci number will be the same distance in kilometers.
Ex. 3mi ≈ 5km
13mi ≈ 21km
55mi ≈ 89km
Here in Colombia we have a weird combination of metric and imperial, not as bad as Canada, but still weird. You go to the hardware store and can get nails, pipes and other things in inches. Then, you go to the gas station and get your tank filled up in gallons. We even use "metric" pounds (500 grams) for foodstuffs like raice or coffee.
Wow that’s so odd! Hopefully you can simplify your lives by going full metric.
Here in Peru it's the same.
speaking of Canadian units, we get butter in 1lb bricks but they're labeled as "454g" officially
funny story, in the US, they sell it in 1/4lb sticks instead of 1lb bricks, so when I read a recipe that said "use 1/2 stick if butter," I used a full 1/2lb, everything was greasy
That reminds me of German's use of the word Pfund (pound) to mean 500 grams
@@1224chrisng it is probably because imperial units have been aligned with the international system. Btw, a metric pound is actually 500gr. Then you have imperial and metric tons, which can be confusing... in Canada, the only unit I have not heard so far is the "stone". Supposedly it was thrown away because people would break their feet too often. ;-)
You forgot the most important conversion! 1 foot is just a bit longer than 1 light-nanosecond.
Haha indeed
very good, I didn't know that!
Interestingly, one metric foot (30 cm exactly) is even closer.
I advocate that the US adopt the metric system, except with the light-nanosecond ("foot") as the unit of length, and the speed of light equal to one billion ft/s by definition.
Regarding the "tsp" and "tbsp", well, we do use that a lot in recipes over here (I'm Swedish). Your "tsp" is our "tsk" for "tesked" - literally teaspoon, and also 5 ml. For "tbsp", we use "msk", for "matsked", meaning "food spoon", and that's 15 ml. So three "tsk" to the "msk". :)
Wow! I had no idea. Thanks for the comment.
Interestingly in Australia a tablespoon is 20ml.
Same in Denmark/Norway at least. Makes me wonder what set the standard: Informal 'spoon norms' coalescing into fixed measurements, or fixed measurements imposed on spoon production? Spoons are great.
Same in Germany ("Teelöffel" = teaspoon, "Esslöffel" = tablespoon). It's just a practical unit. Just fill up a spoon with the ingredient and there you go. We even have "Messerspitze" (knifetip).
@@daisybrain9423 Yep, same in Sweden. We call it "knivsudd" (kniv s udd) meaning "knife tip". A very small amount.
There's also "krm" which stands for "kryddmått" - "spice measure". It's 1 ml. Slightly more than a "knivsudd" (which isn't defined but would be roughly one quarter to one half of a milliliter).
I had to learn Imperial US units just to get a grasp of what people say in movies when dealing with measures 😆
The great thing about tsp and tbsp is that the US (almost 5 and 15) and the metric ones (exactly 5 and 15) are close enough that you should be fine with either set of measuring spoons :D
No, the great thing about teaspoons and tablespoons is that we have those in Europe too, so it's quite easy to use one for measurement.
Which is exactly what we do in cooking recipes.
But I wouldn't dream of saying that a tablespoon is an exact measurement. You can fill it as much as you want and still count as one.
@@povilzem they are different USA has enormous teaspoons
@@povilzem That's exactly the question: if you measure a tbsp of a liquid (syrup for example) the spoon is filled up to the limb of the spoon. If you take wheat or sugar for example you may fill the spoon over the top, or you may fill it to the limb - what is the correct measure?
@@povilzema levelled table spoon is always the same amount, a heaped tps is something else
The best part about them is that the Aussie tablespoon is 20ml because fuck you, NOTHING is allowed to be a global standard.
Your approximations seem pretty spot on. As an American, I'd be perfectly fine switching to metric. Sure, it might take me a bit to get used to the measurements in my head, but I would adapt. One point I would've made when you suggested money in a sexagesimal as opposed to decimal for the ease of fractions, is just how long the UK kept their £sd system, where there was 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound. The system stuck around until the 1970's! I think they made arguments about how easy they could do fractions on that system as a reason to keep it, but I could be wrong about that.
9:25 actually, for a long time in some parts of Europe, one "pound" (Pfund, libre) was defined as exactly half a kilogram. It ceased to be an official units, but when you order "one pound of minced meat" eg in Germany, you will usually get 500 grams.
Btw, gallons is tricky because a British gallon is considerably more than a US gallon (4.5 l, vs 3.8 l). Fortunately in Britain they sell petrol by the litre, although many people still talk about efficiency in terms of mpg rather than comsumption in liters per 100 kilometers.
Yes, a pound ("Pfund") is understood to be half a kilogram and a hundredweight ("Zentner") is a hundred pounds, so 50 kg. They're not really commonly used, but well understood.
And for some weird reason we measure the diameters of bikewheels in inches ("Zoll").
@@daisybrain9423 I think whether they are commonly used depends a lot of the region where you live. And perhaps also of your age. In my perception "Pfund" and "Zentner" are very commonly used, but that not be true for people under the age of maybe 40.
Be careful with those tho. They're not universal across Europe, as they are historical units. They may change even in regions within countries. For example, a Castillian or Spanish pound is around 460g, but if you are buying food in Barcelona and you ask for a pound of ground meat, that would be a Catalan pound, or around 400g.
Nobody even uses gallons in Uk
Pints are also different in size in Uk and US too
One of the problems with the imperial system was its lack of uniformity between the US and UK measures. Before Canada converted to selling gasoline in litres, for example, the British imperial gallon was used (4.546 L) as opposed to the US (3.785 L) gallon. This caused some confusion for tourists visiting each others' countries.
Reminds me of how in tabletop RPGs people seemingly have no problems with feet/inches and lbs for height and weight, but start complaining when I say there's 12 brass pennies to a shilling, and 20 silver shillings to a gold crown.
I’m from Australia and of course I have a subjective bias for the metric system. I have been brought up with it. I’m a huge fan of American renovation shows that are aired on TV here and I am never able to get my head around fractions. When a length of timber for example will need to be cut less than an inch. I work in the construction industry here in Australia and we drop the centimetres completely and just use millimetres and metres. The conversion is easy from one to the other.
I’d like to add Luke I am a fan of your content keep doing what you’re doing. Especially the Latin and Greek videos you post. I am of Greek decent and it makes me happy to see people of other ethnicities and cultures take an interest in my ancestors language. Kind regards
Thanks, Stefan! I really appreciate the comment. As for Greeks in Australia, I frequently listen to a podcast from SBS news in Modern Greek, out of Australia of course. I love how many Hellenic emigrés made their way down under.
It was particularly weird for me (in the UK) because I was basically the last generation that was taught imperial alongside metric.
And I also had a physics teacher who was super-super keen on using metric, and a dad who stubbornly refused to use it (for example, we had a weighing scales at home that was in stones, pounds, and ounces).
So being caught between those two worlds, I ended up, like a lot of British people, super familiar with some metric units, but not others, and super familiar with some imperial units (for example, I always measure my height in feet and inches, as do lots of Brits), but not others (eg, I can honestly say I've never used Fahrenheit to measure temperature in my life).
@@jonathanwebster7091how old are you? I was taught both and I’m 26
@@dylanmurphy9389 39.
When I went to the UK I needed to go somewhere so I googled it on a map and it was only 5 miles and I was eh fine I’ll walk. But that’s like 8km!
Doable, but I hope it was morning and sunny!
AWESOME video, Capt Ranieri. Tks! I am a metric accustomed non-American living outside the US. I remember that when I used to work in Clinical Chemistry (Med Lab Sc), Americans would always use milligrams per liter as a unit of measure & the rest of the world would use millimoles per liter as the unit of measure. This just drives me nuts. Ha ha.
We use a mix of both in UK and I think that’s very beneficial. We even use some measurements that other countries don’t use, like we weigh people in stones, not pounds or kilograms
As a European living in North America, the most difficult conversion I found was from miles/gallon to litre/100km : first convert each unit, then reverse the result, then multiply by "100/1,608 sth". That's harsh.
I'm always flummoxed by wind speeds in meters per second, being accustomed to thinking in miles per hour. A "per" always complicates things, and _especially_ when the conventions are inverse as in your example of fuel economy.
I find it weird how Americans weigh their drinks in ounces instead of ML or CL and this is coming from a Brit who was taught both metric and imperial
US nationals normally come to Argentina with Summer clothes and since ARG is in South America they spect to see palm trees, margaritas and yellow feber. BUT the moment they go out of the airport they find out that argentina is actually next to Antartica...
Jajaja
I swear this video finally helped me to understand imperial system! Thank you so much luke. Mille gratias!
Funny enough. Almost no 2x4s are 2inx4in. They used to be but no longer. We kept the name as its role in construction stayed the same but with better quality of wood available, its more like 1.5in x 3.5in these days.
at least it's still consistent, you're planing off 1/4" from each side every time
compare that with pipe fittings tho, that has no logic
All people really need to remember (regarding distance/speed) is that 100km equals ~ 62 miles. Or that 1 mile equals ~ 1.6km. In the case of the speed limit shown (25mph), this would equal ~ 40km per hour. Easy, eh? In the case(s) of higher speed limit states, such as Nevada, Texas or Montana, a 75mph speed limit would equate to ~ 120km per hour.
7:50 they were separate in ancient Greece as well! Distances between cities were counted by stadia, while smaller distances inside a city were counted with podes!
For most of the metric units there is an imperial unit that is about 10% smaller. 1 meter is a yard + 10%, 1 metric pound (defined as 1/2 kg) is an imperial pound +10%, 1 liter is a quart + 10%.
This country was supposed to metricize in 1976, the year I declared my independence of the English system with Britain and the Commonwealth Nations. Burma (Myanmar) still uses the Imperial and Liberia still uses our obsolete system. Since 1976, I am now in a position to convert to metric nearly immediately. I refuse to use the obsolete system. In 1976, I was taking physics and organic chemistry, which makes it much easier with one system.
I lived in Puerto Rico and I just remember I think is the only us jurisdiction using the metric system. Is sadly getting mixed with the us imperial system as it continues to integrate into the USA. It took me a while to see how much I was paying for gas and how much I was the traveling in distances. The cars imported come in us miles😂. Is a weird mess. I remember using a trick to calculate this stuff quick in on paper in high school but forgot how now😅
I hope Puerto Rico continues to maintain its metric usage in common practice.
when I saw a "spoon" unit in a recipe I have been always wondering which spoon to take: the bigger one, smaller one, or maybe a medium one, now I can convert it to milliliters, thanks!
I’m glad!
Because Phi (the mathematical constant) is close to 1.61 (Φ ≃ 1.618033.... etc ad infinitum) you can use the Fibonacci sequence to approximately convert between miles and kilometers, because the ratio of numbers in the sequence approach phi. The sequence starts 1,1 then adds the previous two terms to get the next so 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55 etc... for kilometers to miles take the closest Fibonacci number and step up one in the sequence, for miles to kilometers take the previous. This may not always be practical if the number you're converting isn't close to a Fibonacci number, but I always found it interesting and, often enough, handy.
Super cool
You can make an argument for Fahrenheit being a better scale for meteorology since it’s scale is between the freezing point of water and blood temperature and Celsius(oops, Kelvin has technically replaced it) for cooking as it’s between the freezing point of water and the boiling point of water.
I also want to expand on the non decimal argument. These measures tend to be highly composite numbers. A highly composite number is a number that has more factors than any number less than itself. They tend to be useful for non precision tasks. This isn’t as necessary today since our tools are much more precise.
As for the money, the British pound used to be 1 pound = 240 pennies. That’s a highly composite number and even though it was a weight holder over from Roman occupation, it was actually very useful for commerce. It persisted for a long time because of this.
Now I agree with your 10s argument since our number system is decimal and that makes it much easier for us to break things apart by decimals. And as you said growing up in a system influences our biases. It could explain why a an hour is 60 minutes seems weird to us decimal people but would be natural to a Babylonian person whose number system was based 60. By the way, metric time was tried and failed.
Metric units: all in Greek or Latin. Luke approves :)
US system: well, actually has tons of stuff from Latin too. MILES comes from Latin to 1000. Pounds and the short lb (from Libra) also come from Latin. Probably more stuff too. Anyone wants to help?
The mile has metric-ish roots, being 1000 paces for Roman legionnaires, if I recall correctly. You can see it in the name. Maybe my legs are shorter then theirs -- my pace is 5 feet, so 1000 of my paces is exactly 5000 feet, which is pretty close to the 5280 feet in a mile.
Actually, the 1000 paces was for the roman mile, which is 5000 feet!
@A. Nonymous I _believe_ that it's the other way around. The chain was invented for surveying miles and rods and furlongs. Mr. Wikipedia says the chain and link as statutory measures followed the invention of the physical surveyor's chain by Mr. Gunter. But let's not throw around too many of these arcane units, or the metricians' heads will really start to explode. :-)
I'm an American, but also a fierce proponent of metric adoption in the US. I've used Celsius on my phone and car's thermometer exclusively since 2018, and try to use metric as often as I can for projects and the like. What first got me into measurements was my grandfather. My grandfather worked as a professor of engineering at our local college, and in engineering he used almost exclusively metric. The exceptions were when he would work with other local businesses or use units only used by engineers (such as Rankine which is an absolute temperature scale based on Fahrenheit.) As someone who wants to follow in his footsteps and become an engineer, I look forward to using metric more often.
On the more broad topic, I'd love to see more videos like this. Maybe you can talk about the strange situations in Canada and the UK, or about lost history with regards to the metric system such as John Shafroth's attempt to adopt metric in the US in the early 1900s or how the lack of metric adoption in the US has negative consequences for both us and the rest of the world (Randy Bancroft has some good resources here: themetricmaven.com/metrication-resources/ ) Overall, great video as usual. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the comment! Yes the Metric Maven is fabulous. Maybe Randy would be interested in a collaboration; I'll have to reach out. I see he has a new book so that might be an opportunity.
Why metric is more convenient than imperial/US : fundamental metric units are all related 1 litre = 1000cm3 = 1kg of water. Also, metric is decimal, meaning you don't have to twist your neurons to figure our that 1km = 1000 metres and that 1 metre = 100 centimetres, as opposed to 1 foot = 12 inches (ok fine) but 1 yard = 3 feet and 1 mile = 1760 yards. Oh, btw, 1 US gallon is not the same as 1 UK gallon, because, you know.... why would they be? ;-)
Also, US people, why Farenheit, where 96 is the temperature of the blood of a horse, come on?! As opposed to 0 celsius = water freezing and 100 celsius = water boiling.
But otherwise, I can understand that a European's appreciation of 1cm is similar to an USian appreciation of 1 inch, where those units become instinctive.
Anecdote : in Quebec, travel distances are expressed as km but body measurements are expressed in british imperial units.
It's worth learning Imperial, since it will never change.
Metric seems nice in concept - until you realize the cost of switching over. Our infrastructure budget is in shambles at best - we can't afford all the changes i.e. the road signage and other structural changes that will be needed to do so.
😂😂😂 Loved the ad, and the video is really helpful as well for us Europeans.
Thanks a million 😊
Great video! If 1 yard is a little bit over 1 meter why don't Americans use yards to wrap their around meters? Or maybe they do? Are yards even used much in daily life?
We don’t use yards very much, unless we have experience with football or shooting. And yes, a yard is a bit under a meter; I may have misstated that in the video.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Next time I'm talking about distances with Americans I'm just going to use yards (while thinking of meters...) then 😆
Haha. Actually, I actively discourage non-Americans from using US measures with Americans. It's not like a language that should be respected; it's essentially a bad way of doing math, that we should be discouraged from using. But since we take badly to being imposed on by "elitists," the key is simply to use metric exclusively, and if we don't understand, help us understand through the input method - "this is how long a meter is; this is two meters" - rather than translating through conversions. It's the only way we'll acquire metric.
While I 100% agree with the conclusion-that metric is a far superior system to US Customary, I would argue that it’s primary advantage over traditional unit systems like US customary, British Imperial, and countless others, comes NOT primarily from its decimalization-math works in any base, and some nondecimal bases would probably have been a better choice than decimal *if our standard mathematical notation wasn’t decimal by default*-nor in that it is based on supposedly more “fundamental” enlightenment concepts-the original definitions sound even, but are still ultimately arbitrary, and their current, more precise and replicable definitions are ALSO used by the current US Customary system, which is currently defined on metric and involves very inelegant multipliers to keep them roughly in step with their Napoleonic predecessors-but in that it is a SINGLE, top-down, unified system designed for easy conversion between different dimensions (through the relations of base units) and scales (through the regular order-of-magnitude prefix system).
A sexigesimal metric system paired with a system of sexigesimal positional numerals would be just as good as a decimal one paired with decimal positional numerals, and better in some situations, but US Customary ain’t that. It’s a collection of dozens of different measuring systems each developed to be convenient for one specific traditional trade that people stitched together into a frankenstein’s monster of a complete measurement system so it *could* be used in modern situations, but really wasn’t designed for the amount of unit conversion professionals have to deal with nowadays. And a single worldwide standard is better for everyone, whether we picked the “right” size for our initial base units or the “right” mathematical base to scale it with is ultimately irrelevant.
It's perfectly correct to use the pound as a unit of mass; that's what it means on, for example, a food label. Of course, you can also use it as a unit of force, which is why we distinguish the pound-mass and the pound-force when context is not sufficient. (And then there are the slug and the poundal, defined so that a pound-force is one slug foot per square second and a poundal is one pound-mass foot per square second, but nobody uses those in daily life, and only rarely in engineering anymore.)
Looking at NIST's definitions, it seems that the default meaning for ‘pound’ is the avoirdupois pound-mass (defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg), and if you mean anything else (troy pound, apothecary pound, or any version of pound-force), then you're supposed to say.
I write stories sometimes, mostly in English (not my native langauge), and I always use yards whenever I'm mentioning distance, unless it's a few inches, because it's easier to convert in my head 😂
In Austria we have this weird thing when we go shopping cheese or ham, we neither use grams (although you could, but you’d be immediately recognised as a stranger) nor kilograms, we use decagrams (we just say Deka), which is 10 grams. I have no idea why we do this, because it’s literally only for shopping ham or cheese 😂
Fun fact: In Italy they use “etti”, which are hectograms (100 grams) in the same situation only.
How many toes in a Foot? 🤔
5
Also in America numbers are written differently
🇪🇺: 12.345,67
🇺🇸: 12,345.67
No, this is actually a convention of *languages* , not regions. In English, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, Scots, Gaelic, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Tagalog, much of Arabic, as well as a few other languages, we use commas for thousands and points for decimals. Many other European languages, as you note, do the opposite.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Yes, But is also worth mentioning because I was very confused when I saw prices in france that said €14,25
In British English it's conventional to use commas when for example denoting thousands ('a thousand' would be '1,000; a million would be '1,000,000, and so on), as it is in much of the rest of the English speaking world.
That's not exclusively an American thing.
@@jonathanwebster7091 That’s right, the world is pretty split on it. Israel 🇮🇱, Mexico 🇲🇽, Japan 🇯🇵 and China 🇨🇳 uze dots instead of commas. I live in the UK 🇬🇧.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Everyone should just use spaces to separate thousands, that way it doesn't really matter if you use a period or a comma for the decimals, it's clear from context.
As someone from the US who likes to cook, I didn't even know about the teaspoon-to-cup ratio. We really ought to be pushing more for further adoption of the metric system.
Until I made this video, I had no idea either. I did the research and found out. But yeah, it's interesting: as metric units of volume have become more common, the US units for volume are less well known.
@@polyMATHY_Luke in Quebec, where I live and where both systems are used, the cups, spoons, etc...are metric. 1 tspoon = 5ml, 1tb spoon = 15ml, 1 cup = 250ml, ...
@@polyMATHY_Luke So, speaking as someone who's in my mid-20s, do you foresee earnest pushes for further US metrification occurring within, say, my lifetime or maybe that of the next generation?
@@metalpunk I think we could be as metricofied as the uk by the next 50 years or so, especially as the us becomes majority minority soon. However I think that the units will not all be adopted at once, and there will be a mix and match by then instead of full adoption.
So first of all, we do use many metric units already in day to day, electrical units are all metric (Ohm, amp, volt, kWh), as are units for data (we also just started using lumens for light instead of watts once LEDs took off).
What I think could happen first is that cooking units get pegged to metric, either at quart~liter or tsp~5 mL.
We rarely use ounces any more except for the weight of newborn babies for some reason, it’s usually a decimal pound. Keep in mind though that generally it’s going TJ be tougher to switch from a smaller unit to a larger one, since people like having that kind of precision.
If we invest in making road signs display both miles and km, that will help the switch. The issue is that on highways all of the exits are numbered based on mile markers (how far away you are in miles from the start of the highway. So for the one near me, switching exits 1, 3, 5, and 9 to exits 1, 5, 8, and 15 would be very confusing.
Meters can probably replace feet in the medium distances soon, like for many younger Americans 200m is more intuitive than 600ft (not an exact conversion, but the comparison would be unfair if it was).
The biggest thing I think though for volume measurements will be the reduction in gas powered cars, as gallons are so ingrained in our system im that people will flip out if they see something at $0.85 on the price sign and pay $50 or more for a full tank of gas.
These will all be slow transitions for the public and expensive transitions for the government? But it is possible.
@@metalpunk I vaguely remember it was tried in 1979. I was 2 and I remember people were upset thinking they were being cheated with gasoline. Pro tip: don’t try metrification during an energy crisis.
One way to think of American ("statute") miles in relation to kilometers is to understand that 80km is 49.7 miles, which can be rounded off to 50 miles. Therefore, 25mph is 40km/h and 120km/h is 75mph.
Nautical miles are not just there to be obtuse. A nautical mile is a _minute_ of _latitude_ on a navigational chart, so (unlike the kilometer) the nautical mile is actually based on a useful distance, not just some arbitrary multiple of one dimension of a certain cubic volume of fresh water or some such other irrelevant factoid.
Well, Britain is completely crazy. We use Celsius (except for some old people), we drive in miles and miles per hour, we buy drinks and fuel in litres but still talk about miles per (Imperial) gallon, and our gallons are slightly bigger gallons, as you touched upon in the video. And heights are feet and inches, which I understand, yet somehow for weights I am happier with kilograms. We are mid-Atlantic, but I think slowly we are heading towards Europe and the rest of the world.
At least you are using A4 paper! 🙂 In Canada, I think things are a bit more advanced. Young people are counting in metric, except for body measures, which are still expressed in british units, for some reason. The biggest thing preventing a full conversion is that all industrial goods are sold using the imperial system, probably because of trade with our much bigger neighbour in the south. We also use US paper formats such as letter paper and sometimes that absurd "legal" format, both of which make no sense at all.
And then I was watching a British mystery where the victim weighed 18 stone, which sent me immediately to Google. 😊
I think there are only two areas where US units might have the edge in everyday life:
- Temperatures are that little bit more precise, so it's easier to judge how it's going to feel like once you're out. The 0 for freezing is very practical though, but the 100 for body temperature just shows the scale is adapted to the human body. Still can't wrap my head about Fahrenheits though
- Small units for cooking like the teaspoon or the tablespoon have some advantages, since your unit is directly linked with your measurement tools. In non-imperial world, it makes things that little bit more of a fuss, but that's just as long as you don't have adapted tools. So that's a limited advantage too
Otherwise, yeah, meters, kilometres... so much better.
We do use tablespoons (15mL) and teaspoons (5mL) in the metric world?
I agree 100 per cent (a decimal concept, from the Latin per centum) with your pro-metric stance. My country, the United States, is in the worst possible situation. At this time, by official estimates, the U.S. is about 60 per cent converted from its "customary" system, with more conversion to metric units occurring every year. Our problem is that we are now "in medias res," stuck in transition, the worst possible situation. But metric use is growing, as you indicated. Product labels have metric values, so the U.S. "Customary" system can be disregarded. Digital thermometers can be set to display degrees Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, etc. The key is not to do conversions at all, but to think metric and disregard the customary units, much as thinking in Latin (as a goal) makes understanding easier than a strict grammar-translation process. BTW, your linguistic videos are fantastic, going far beyond even Allen, Sturtevant, and the rest. Your knowledge is impressive, far beyond any of the Classicists I know (including myself!).
The way some people talk, you'd think it's a binary situation and the US uses only imperial while almost every other country uses only metric. We (in the US) use imperial more often in our day-to-day lives, but we do use metric sometimes. For instance, if we buy a bottle of Mountain Dew at the convenience store, it's likely to be a liter or a two-liter. You can't get a quart bottle. So pretty much everyone here knows what a liter is, and other measurements like kilograms and centimeters are a bit less known, but most people have some idea roughly how big they are. The Celsius temperature scale is probably the one people are the least familiar with. Everyone is taught the metric system in elementary school, but a lot of people forget it from not using it.
And as I've said before, no one uses the metric system for everything. The talk of speed limits in the video is the perfect example. Meters per second are the only metric unit of speed with an optional prefix for really fast or slow things. Does anyone set their speed limits in m/s? When I hear someone give their age in megaseconds or gigaseconds, then I'll believe someone is serious about switching entirely to metric.
Thanks for the comment, Martin. Plenty more linguistic and philology content coming this month, so I'm glad you like those.
I concur as well with your assessment of our state in mediās rēs. My thinking is that we can each start using and thus gently encouraging our countrymen to become familiar with metric in ways like this video. Or perhaps more subtly.
I also agree with the immersion concept. That's what I recommendede here: ua-cam.com/video/X98cIRlEI2k/v-deo.html
Hi chitlitlah, thanks for the comment. My video at this link is to help people acquire Celsius, which I believe is the easiest to master with the tricks I say here: ua-cam.com/video/X98cIRlEI2k/v-deo.html
As for the metric units, meters per second is not the only metric unit of speed. You are talking about something very important, though, which are the seven SI base units: meters, seconds, moles, kilograms, amperes, candelas, kelvins. All other units in the metric system, like kilometers and hours, are derived from them, and are part of the complete metric system. Even though decimal time isn't going to happen any time (hehe) soon, hours are absolutely part of the metric system since they are based on the second, an SI base unit.
The even more absurd part is that even the US customary measures are part of the metric system, since they're all defined from metric units, and have been for some time. So if I were to be a bit more honest in the video above, I could have highlighted this (as I did in the Celsius video from last year), and noted that we're already quite metricated; we have merely made life much much harder for ourselves by placing clumsy (as I see them) "customary" units on top of a much more elegant and ultimately, in my opinion, more useful system.
@@polyMATHY_Luke To me, metric prefixes such as kilo- don't prevent a unit from being metric because it's a power of ten which is the whole philosophy and advantage of the metric system. On the other hand, saying an hour is 3600 seconds doesn't seem very metric. The system loses it's advantage over the imperial system if it says a minute is 60 seconds, an hour is 60 minutes, a day is 24 hours, etc.
But like you say, if an hour (defined as 3600 seconds) _is_ metric, then an inch (defined as 2.54 cm) is just as metric. If their speed limits are in metric, then so are ours since a mile is exactly 1609.344 meters.
@A. Nonymous I can't remember ever seeing a liquor bottle that wasn't metric and I buy a lot of booze. They're typically called half gallons (handles), fifths, and pints, but they're really 1.75L, 750mL, and 375mL. They don't even print the imperial measurement on the bottle most of the time. Add to that short list medicines. Pills are in mg and syrups are in mL. Generally, I agree with you though.
13:00 we do use quarter and half dollars.
Gallons in the USA differ from Gallons everywhere else.
Even Tons in the USA are incoherent with Tons everywhere else.
Fahrenheit was based on the coldest temperature that was possible to achieve in Fahrenheit's laboratory at the time.
1m = 3 feet 3 inches.
8:35 well to make it more confusing, a 2x4 is not actually 2" by 4", but 1.5" x 3.5". We like to keep people on their toes :)
That’s true! I neglected that in the video.
@@polyMATHY_Luke The 2x4 was made from a 2"x4" piece of wood, which was then shaved flat (which meant a little excess would be lost).
I grew up with the old UK system but thankfully we learned the decimal system at school and when things changed in the early 70s all was simple. Untill I went to the USA for 3.333 years and was flumoxed by their different values to their Imperial system and the practice of measuring with Cups ! .
As an astrologer who does complicated sums with 360 degrees and days divided into 24 hours I feel you could address the continued use of the Sumarian system for counting time which has now become ubiquitous world wide
I might touch on this some day.
Even the metric system is not ideal at one point, if we want to use large numbers, some countries use the short scale, others the long scale. So I often have to look for the origin of the information, whether they meant a billion as a milliard(10^9), or whether it is a billion(10^12).
I got my driver's license in Canada in the 90s. I saw it had kg on them and since I was in wrestling and the weight classes were in kg I knew my weight in kg, so when they asked me my weight I just said "54 kg"
She looked confused and asked "How many lbs?"
"120.." And then she inputted that.
A couple months later my license arrives in the mail and it says 54 kg
I am here to lobby for a return to 12 pence per shilling, 20 shillings per pound for US currency. LOL. You're right it's what we're familiar with - but I don't think the metric system's ubiquity is so much due to it being "logical" as much as it's due to enlightenment revolutionary governments turning over Europe. The metric units that ordinary people used multiple times a day (time/calendar) got reverted as soon as it was feasible, and thank goodness. I did live in France for a year, but I never felt like there was any benefit to it; everything I had occasion to measure just felt like the units were all out of scale - either 100s of something or hundredths of something. You never got to measure in the "one to 20" range. And one _could_ - I have no idea why decimeters aren't used; that'd make a lot of sense and remove part of my resistance.
Hm. People, 15-20dm tall, 15dm long table, 20dm tall door.
You're on to something. Those sound ridiculously convenient.
Decameters, too: City block 10-20dam, a short street, 20-30dam
a gallon was originally made because that was the size of the 1 gallon wine bottle 1 family of 4 required for 1 week of meals. I wish I was making that up.
the volume metric system is a decimal system that uses base 10 decimal system with liters being the base... but the US system is a fractional system with 1 gallon wine bottles as the base.... (examples below)
a half-gallon is 1/2 of a gallon
a quart is 1/2 of a half-gallon or 1/4 of a gallon
a pint is 1/2 a quart or 1/8 of a gallon
a cup is 1/2 of a pint, or 1/16 of a gallon
1 fluid-ounce is 1/8 of a cup, 1/16 if a pint, 1/32 of a quart, 1/64 of a half gallon, or 1/128 of a gallon.
with temperature it works more day to day because the temperature in US ranges from 0F to 100F between january and july. of course it sometimes can reach -20Fto 120F (but -20 sounds really freaking cold and it is... and 120 sounds really freaking hot and it is...)
from day to day 0-100 is way easier to keep track of then -17C to 37C depending on season.
maybe if we are trying to boil water or make ice Celsius is way easier to keep track of. but fahrenheit is based on weather/climate/air temperature rather than water temperature.
with distance it goes back to the Romans kinda.
1 foot is the size of a 6ft tall Roman mans shoe. or a romans shoe is 1/6 his height.
inch came from old english word ynce or 1/12th of a roman foot.
a yard is 3 roman feet.
now for a mile it gets more complicated.. a mile is 1000 roman paces ... which is 2000 strides or steps.... where they walked 2000 "steps" away and it came out to ~5280 feet. at
31.5 inch strides / 12 inches in a foot x 2000 strides.
and an acre is an area approximately how much land 2 oxen dragging a plow can plow in a day.
On temperature, I opine from real experience that Celsius is quite a bit easier for day to day: ua-cam.com/video/X98cIRlEI2k/v-deo.html
If it weren't the Swedes and Finns would have switched to Farhenheit long ago, don't you think?
@@polyMATHY_Luke As a Finn, 30 is already unbearably hot, so whenever people cite temps in Fahrenheit I have no clue whether I need a jacket or sunscreen because they're all different variations of hell by the number anyway.
8:30 A 2x4 piece of construction lumber is actually 1 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches. Something having to do with lumber yards using saw blades that are 1/2 inch wide if I'm not mistaken...
Indeed, I missed that
As a language precisionist (I just made that up!) you should note that US customary, like all measurement systems is a metric. I know, everyone calls the French metric, now the SI, The Metric System. I am a scientists and do not like the SI for several reasons. The main one is the shear stupidity and revolutionary zeal that led to a new basic unit if length instead of a standardized yard. The yard and meter only differ by 10% (not 28%) but it has been a major pain for everyone. All they had to do was create new divisions for the length of the yard and use the silly names that chose with the meter.
As you know, any leaned person at the time would recognize the Latin versus Greek prefixes for things bigger or smaller than a base unit. But that distinction is not known by many today. And of course the multi-syllable names that are easily misheard should have followed the style of the Imperial metric with single syllable names that sound noting like each other.
As for non-subjective differences, factors of 10 are too large for convenient use. Instruments other than volume controls have dials with positions of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50,..... in order to have usable precision. The reason 12 inches and 3 feet is useful is rooted in rational arithmetic, which is perfect. 12 is as you say commensurate with 2, 3, 4, and 6. Rational arithmetic is also perfect on computers with no roundoff. OTOH 1/10 is impossible to represent exactly in binary. If the meter were a yard or if the common units were redefined to fit the meter, then using both rational and French would be easy and very useful.
A most unfortunate missed opportunity by the intellectuals of the time. And defining the meter as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the pole? When they could have picked any of the standard yards as the reference? This is an ultimate in egghead nincompoopery.
I think F is better for weather, and C for most else, and find decrees C too large, so prefer the precision of half degrees C. I use my maps in km, one which program very frequently mis-translates speed limits into km for me. Happily, I known that 35mph=60km/h not 40hm/h which equals 25mph. Then there's the issue of sales tax rather than VAT here in the US, so where I live, food is price plus 1%, non-food is price plus 6%, and restaurants meals are price plus 6-10% depending on where I'm dining, and no tax at all on prescription nor non-prescription drugs.
Once, in New Hampshire, a clerk tried to talk me out of buying a brownie with nuts in it, as the luxury tax applied to the nuts. I invited on the brownie with nuts, as I don't mind paying tax, as that's part of living in a civilized society.
One quirk is -40 degrees is the same on both scales.
@@ericbarlow6772 Fahrenheit is useless for weather; there's no inbuilt point of reference. With Celsius you know 0 is freezing and 100 is boiling, and almost everything in daily life relates well to this range. Meanwhile in fahrenheit, water freezes at like 22.245957821 and boils at 135.7889752 or some shit, the whole system was devised around the freezing point of ammonia or something irrelevant like that.
@@digitalbrentable no it’s actually one of the areas it can be better than Celsius. How often do you use the upper end of the scale for weather? Not often. Scales are good for measuring what’s in between the upper and lower bounds. Since Fahrenheit is between the freezing point and blood temperature, it’s more intuitive as a feels like scale. Celsius is great for cooking because it uses the freezing and boiling points of water. While you can use either scale for anything you want, keep in mind what they were designed for. Besides, Kelvin is the actual SI unit so in reality the debate is moot.
Hi and thanks for the comment, I appreciate it. Pretty much all thermostats allow one to select temperature in Celsius in decimals of a degree, thus on my thermostat I can select 20.5 degrees or 20.0 or 19.5 etc. Given that this is the basis of almost all thermostats in Celsius around the world, the result is that Celsius in practical usage is actually more precise than Fahrenheit thermostats, which usually don't bother with decimal degrees.
@@ericbarlow6772 The upper half of the celsius range is used for sauna temperatures, a regular part of a civilised human's daily life ;)
According to the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States is now about 60 per cent converted to the metric system since the passage of the 1988 Omnibus and Trade Competitiveness Act. As of 2021, it is estimated that 30% of U.S. businesses, mostly the larger ones, are metricated completely or almost completely. The U.S. is metricated completely or almost completely in the following areas:
(1) pharmaceuticals (grams, milliliters, etc.)
(2) lighting (lumens, kelvin, etc.)
(3) nuclear power (sieverts)
(4) electricity and magnetism (watts, volts, kilowatt hours, milliamperes, etc.)
(5) alcoholic beverages (liters, milliliters)
(6) automobiles, bicycles, and their parts (built to metric units)
(7) science
(8) medicine
(9) pharmaceuticals
(10) computers and electronics
(11) solar power (e.g., kilowatt hours, watts per square meter)
(12) time (seconds, etc.)
(13) Olympic and other sports events (meters, kilograms, etc.)
(14) food and nutrition (grams. milligrams, calories, etc.)
(15) radio and television (kilohertz, megahertz, etc.)
(16) bottled water and soft drinks (liters, milliliters, etc.)
(17) weather (millibars)
(18) radioactivity (sievert, gray)
(19) hardware (partially)
(20) automobiles (mostly)
(21) climatology (degrees Celsius)
(22) military, especially the U.S. Army
(23) aviation
(24) civil engineering (partly)
(25) architecture (partly)
(26) farm equipment
(27) meteorology
(28) space science
(29) electronics
(30) optometry
(31) undoubtedly others not listed here
Very cool! Where are these statistics from?
In my country we use inches for nails and construction stuff(but we also use metric, like, we don't measure surfaces in cubic feet or heights in feet) , and we use teaspoons and table spoons and cups for cooking.
For distances we use kilometers and when on foot we use some olds obsolete measurements that aren't really standarised like a cuadra, you'll get a exact measurement if you google it but it isn't really used like that colloquially.
Farenheits are just nonsensical to me, Miles per hour and such I don't really care, we use kilometers of course but I don't get the hate on that one and I also don't get the hate on spoons and cups for measurements in the kitchen, it really doesn't take much to notice that cooking is based on proportions so as long as you use the same cup and spoons (even if it isn't the exact size a cup (unit) is set as) for everything on the recipee you'll get a good result.
In agriculture, colloquially people commonly measure things in what they are stored in and that's not standardised either so if you to a wet market and buy a sack of potatos you could be getting 20 or 22 or maybe 24 kilos and if you buy a fruit crate it's more of the same. Of course, it's not like you can't just ask for it to be measured and they tend to be similar enough to the point where it doesn't matter.
one pet peeve I have with metric is people who write mililiters "ml" instead of the correct "mL"
I guess the correct solution is to switch to all SI units, volume in m^3, speed in m/s, and temperature in Kelvin
They are both correct and ml is much much more common (I scare to insert link as could be blocked by youtube, but just look correspondent article in wiki). Moreover there is a convention that capital letters are for the units formed from names of scientist (despite the unit itself should be small, e.g. newton has symbol N).
@@alaksiejstankievicx fun fact, the litre is named after Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, a French pre-revoulutionary glass blower, who also has a daughter naned Mille
at least according to a U-Waterloo from April 1st
How many popular songs use the metric system? Few, if any, I trow. But numerous pop songs use miles, e.g., Walk A Mile in My Shoes, A Thousand Miles Away, I Can See for Miles, Eight Miles High, Moonlight Mile, 500 Miles, etc. When it comes to pop/rock music, the metric system just can’t compete. “If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone, you can hear the whistle blow a 160.9 kilometers…”? Nah.
Hehe, but those are all popular songs in English, and the vast majority of popular songs are American in order, and after they British, where they also use Imperial units. Have you researched popular songs beyond the English speaking world?
@@polyMATHY_Luke Popular songs, no. No reason to do so. But classical, absolutely. Being of Italian ancestry myself, I’m especially fond of opera: Puccini, Verdi, Vivaldi, Rossini. And I hold in highest regard the late Italian composer and conductor, Ennio Morricone (1928 - 2020), one of the most prolific and versatile composers of the 20th century. He composed and recorded the sound tracks for all three of Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns," starring Clint Eastwood. He also composed the score for "Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968). Morricone has received two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, five BAFTAS, and an Academy Honorary Award for “magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.” Molto buone!
In defense of the U.S. system
The distances for smaller measurements are often based on the human body, i.e. the inch was based on King David of Scotland's thumb, so we can approximate it with our thumb. The foot was Henry VIII's foot, so we can approximate it with ours. A cubit is the length of the forearm-ish (roughly 18 inches). The span is the hand spread out (roughly 9 inches). The distances are less arbitrary than the metric systems. Miles, though, still befuddles me. I don't get it.
For weight and volume, the divisibility is more useful when dividing out the units into common fractions as you said, the difficulty in the decimal format comes from the inefficiency of a base-ten numeral system. I would personally advocate for base 12.
For temperature, I think that both sides have practical uses. Celsius divides useful temperatures into sets of ten. Fahrenheit has a continuum from 0 to 100 that relates inversely to the amount of clothing you need.
In summary, U.S. distance is good for rough approximation on the fly, U.S. weight and volume are good for common fractions, and temperature is based somewhat on preference.
Please feel free to reply with counterpoints.
Indeed miles weren't standardised in England and Wales until the reign of Elizabeth I (Scotland, had its own 'Scots mile' that wasn't abolished until later).
So you had an English mile, which would have been 2.1 km (and even that varied between different areas of England),
You had the Welsh mile, which was 3 miles, 1760 yards.
And you had the Irish mile, which was 2,240 yards.
In 1593, Parliament passed the Weights and Measures Act, which did away with the various English miles and the Welsh mile, and introduced a standardised, or statute mile.
The act stated: "A Mile shall contain eight Furlongs, every Furlong forty Poles, and every Pole shall contain sixteen Foot and an half." The statute mile therefore contained 5,280 feet or 1,760 yards."
That's the mile that's used in both British imperial and American Customary Units.
The Irish mile continued to be used for quite a while after that, and there was some residual use of it until the 19th and 20th century.
In Scotland, the Scots mile was longer than the English mile- It comprised 8 (Scots) furlongs divided into 320 falls or faws (Scots rods). It varied from place to place but the most accepted equivalencies are 1,976 Imperial yards (1.123 statute miles or 1.81 km).
It was legally abolished three times: first by a 1685 Act of the Scottish Parliament, again by the 1707 Act of Union with England, and finally by the Weights and Measures Act of 1824. It had continued in use as a customary unit through the 18th century but had become obsolete by its final abolition.
Statute miles are, incidentally, still used throughout the UK to this day, both (exclusively) on road signs, on milometers in cars (where they appear alongside km) and generally as a method of measuring long distances (although kilometres are used too).
Also it was Henry I, rather than Henry VIII that was said to have standardised the length of a foot, based on the length of his arm, in around 1101 (that's probably apocryphal though, and is really just tradition).
But certainly, by the c. 1300 Act concerning the Composition of Yards and Perches, (traditionally credited to either Edward I or II), the statute foot was a different measure, exactly 10/11 of the old, or 'Belgic" foot that had been previously used.
@@jonathanwebster7091 thanks for the info, mate
@@Stormageddon571 and yeah, being from basically the last generation in the UK that was taught both alongside each other (I was born in 1984), I can see the advantages of both too.
"14.515 tonnes, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt ..." ;-)
I personally don't find the feet and the miles and the inches and the gallons confusing or cumbersome. I know most conversions by heart. What I do consider really messed up is the use of fractions for dividing up things, particularly when the denominator keeps changing! It's not immediately obvious that 3/32 is smaller than 1/8. On the other hand, 0.094 vs 0.125 is very easy to read and place in the correct order.
There's a video of the VSauce guys answering 100 most commonly googled questions. Question #96 was "how many ounces in a gallon" and those supposedly smart people, brought up in the American system, answered confidently "64".
Tu voz y tu pronunciación son tan hermosas, Luke🤍
This is a useful video.
I use rule of thumb conversions when reading journals and the like, but I'm in no hurry to get off the imperial system. It's not because it's better, but simply because it's what I, and my neighbors, know. None of these reforms take place from the ground up but from the top down. Most people just won't find the utility to forcibly convert themselves.
This is for the exact same reason we've never really gotten off of Sumerian time. We still have 24 hours (two twelve hour segments) and divide it into 60 minutes. This isn't decimal, and it won't be fore the foreseeable future. Even top-down reform can't overcome the momentum the Sumerians put into place.
For the same reason, I'll stick with my imperial units unless I leave the US. The benefit just isn't worth the hassle. :)
I think with feet and meters, feet are for builders I think because it's easier to read 1fr 6in on a tape measure then it is to read 45cm.
Thank for this nice video!
Thanks for watching!
In the UK we learned the 12 times table until quite recently due to there being 240 pence in a pound until 1971. It actually makes more sense to have 240 pennies to the pound than 100 pence as 240 has more factors so the maths is more simple. I could divide 240 pence by, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 30, 60 and 80. I may have missed one or two. 100 pence is divisible by only 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50. Yet young people tell me decimal (metric) money makes more sense and makes the maths easier?
Was sharing recipes with a friend in Europe and after explaining how you determine which type of ounce, they wanted to know if we were crazy. Then they asked, if you melt the chocolate, do you have to switch which ounce to use? Yep, we use Crazy Units.
As much as I love the unit prefixes, I never liked the claim metric is based on the interrelated nature of physical dimensions, since they’re ultimately about as arbitrary as ACU. The meter was based on an inaccurate estimate of the Earth’s circumference, then that mistaken measure had a very arbitrary fraction of a lightsecond (itself defined by the second, which is based on a very arbitrary amount of cessium radiation activity) assigned as its definition. Till 2011, the kilogram was defined as “the weight of this chunk of platinum” (a chunk of platinum that shrank over time no less!). Looking at it from the other end, since ACU are defined by being equal to metric units, ACU are, in fact, just as defined by that fraction of a lightsecond/amount of energy/etc. as metric units are!
Clearly we need a system of units based on atoms of lead or gold
They are indeed based on the conversion of physical dimensions: mass derived from volume derived from length. Hence the ability to immediately determine volume from length and vice versa
And to confuse matters more there's a difference between "nominal" and "actual lumber sizes. So a 2"x4" is actually 1.5"x3.5". There is a reasonable explanation for how this came about, but not for why we still do it.
Yes, my mistake on that
@@polyMATHY_Luke I wouldn't even call it a mistake; it's maddening!
Salve, Lucianus. The benefit of the metric system is, that it's so basic. - Greetings from Denmark. 🇩🇰
I tried the Celsius temp convert thing which worked until winter. In a Midwest Winter, my gear changes every 5F degrees, I could internalize the summer temp fine, but kept finding myself overdressing instinctively in response to the negative sign until I changed my device temp back to Farenheit, possibly because polymathy only took the scale down to zero C and that's shorts and hoodie weather if there's no wind.
Also I have serious trouble conceptualizing measurement in general.
For example, in the closing argument - .4 of a mile means nothing to me because I have serious trouble picturing / conceptualizing distance. A mile literally means nothing to me, but neither really does 500 yards. 100 yards and below is meaningful because after years of marching band, I do understand the length of a football field mostly, but practically, 5 yards is the biggest measurement I can reliably replicate / understand without a measuring tool.
I have tried to learn metric, but given my difficulty in conceptualizing measurement, it's been an uphill battle. I have body / concrete equivalents for standard, but not for metric. I have tried to find them for metric, but haven't had much luck. As such, I cannot picture the metric measurements which makes them really hard for me to use.
Metric users, what approximants were you taught as a young child? What is the metric equivalent to 'two fingers is an inch' and a 'finger' is a fluid oz, and so on? That's what I really need to learn to metric.
"That metric system is the tool of the devil. My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead. And that's the way I likes it!" 😅😅😅😅
Petoleum distillate products are never sold be the hogshead.
Now that you have brought it up, it would make more sense to have sub-dollar units be non-decimal-based. This is how the Romans did it and they had just about the most economically successful nation at their height.
The British Empire also had a similar system of various non-decimal monetary subdivisions and their economic might conquered the world!
The penny, as it is, is utterly useless. The only just reason to keep it as the current system is that the federal reserve will inflate away the useful value in all dollar subdivisions before a new system could be legislated.
The fact is, regardless of math skills or literacy, the vast majority of everyday business of getting on with life is not academic but holistic.
Small counts are easier and faster to intuit than larger, at it is less "ram" to move around. In a nation that actually conducts business instead of just thinking about doing it, such an ease of calculation is much appreciated.
An ideal situation would be dual systems for most things with an ease of translation between them - usable both holistically and academically.
Dealing in both Imperial and metric is a sorry excuse for a solution, as they do not translate well, and I understand why many foolishly advocate capitulating to that farce, that sterile, inhuman, disgustingly French measurement system.
I understand why, but you're still foolish.
Since I enjoy a friendly debate about this subject, I shall respond.
"Now that you have brought it up, it would make more sense to have sub-dollar units be non-decimal-based. This is how the Romans did it and they had just about the most economically successful nation at their height.
The British Empire also had a similar system of various non-decimal monetary subdivisions and their economic might conquered the world!"
If this system really is better, then why did the Brits go to a decimal system of currency in 1971, much to their economic benefit? Given the US's extraordinary economic power, its decimalization seems not to be harming it. Thus, in the spirit of debate, I'd say your idea is easily dismissed.
"The fact is, regardless of math skills or literacy, the vast majority of everyday business of getting on with life is not academic but holistic.
Small counts are easier and faster to intuit than larger, at it is less "ram" to move around. In a nation that actually conducts business instead of just thinking about doing it, such an ease of calculation is much appreciated."
I reiterate what I said in the video: you advocate some sort of perceived naturalness or usefulness for US units, but the only reason you feel this way is because they're familiar. You say " In a nation that actually conducts business," meaning that the US is a mighty economic powerhouse. With this I strongly agree, and it is of course self-evident. But our not using metric has not been any aid to our economic success. More likely it has been a hindrance. You write, "such an ease of calculation is much appreciated." You seem to be arguing for the metric system, which is objectively easier by definition in all calculations.
You describe the metric system as "that farce, that sterile, inhuman, disgustingly French measurement system" - but I would like to remind you that it was Thomas Jefferson's idea first, his invention.
My assessment, if you will allow me, is that your reasoning, rather than from any data or test scenarios, in fact comes from a mix of subjective familiarity and patriotism. Now, I'm a patriot too, and I have over a decade of military service to back up that claim. And one of our great virtues as Americans is our inventiveness, our innovation, our way of finding better ways to do things. Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so; thus it really is odd that we have not followed through on the innovation we in fact were instrumental in developing, and in fact accepted, as the US is actually now, right now, on the metric system.
Thanks for the debate and friendly conversation.
@@polyMATHY_Luke
>why did the Brits go to a decimal system of currency in 1971
I don't know but what they did after they fell from their status of economic hegemon is almost irrelevant given that they had this system before and during the entire time they were the economic engine of the world. My first point was that such a system is not a catastrophic or even major issue given that such massive economic blocks already successfully utilized them for centuries. Also, the US, for much of its existence, did not have a national bank, and no national bank notes, ergo the currency was backed and printed by private banks. As for how many of those notes had thirds or fourths denominations, we might not be able to say except to look at the trends of national currencies at the time, which often had these sorts of fractional denominations. Our rise from backwater to world-class power in the late 19th century and early 20th century, primarily using this system, shows that such a system is not inherently a weakness. I am establishing historical evidence of non-delinquency as foundation for my next arguments. I can't very well make an argument without ground to stand on. Oh and the decades of greatest economic growth in our history happened before the federal reserve was instituted, so this point of "the US not being harmed by decimal fractions" can't be substantiated by axiom.
>the only reason you feel this way is because they're familiar.
No. The reason I believe it to be superior, for much of but not all of daily life, is because of the facts of cognition. Your mind, so it is reckoned, can easily hold only about 7 to 8 digits at any one instant and can do operations on maybe one or two in the same instant. When you treat your mind as a computer, as a number cruncher, this is the fact of its nature at its smallest individuated time intervals. Decimal alone forces you to pay the "time tax" of extra precision even when almost none is required. It's akin to the extra programming complexity of manually calculating fixed vs floating point number operations, it shows up in everything you use it for. Having to calculate multiples of costs in decimal for an extra half second keeps the mind from the actually important and subjective economic decision of "how much do I actually value such goods". More simply, it keeps the mind thinking more of "can I buy it" rather than "should I buy it". Multiply that loss of useful time over hundreds of millions of people a day, maybe a few times a day, and you end up with many lifetimes of collected life wasted every year. And you must either eat the cost or lose the precision, which many people simply do, and this loss of precision has its own time cost in the associated loss of opportunity. This is one reason among many why farmers markets often deal primarily in whole numbers or very simple fractions.
Apart from that, my point about the cognitive speed in reasoning in simple fractions over simple decimal, the "Imperial" system has many units which are similar in size to very human things or multiples of such things. The prime example of this is the foot but, also, the mile is similar to 1000 paces and an inch is similar to the length of the tip of a finger. This makes it very easy to intuit and, as I mentioned before, very quick to calculate with on the fly.
This is stark contrast to metric where the primary unit, the meter, is far too long to reason with on the body, which is how one intuits distance most easily. Furthermore, you often have to reason exclusively in these multisyllabic, prefixed words derived from deci- centi- and mili-, which is a whole other can of worms and yet another mental handicap to reasoning about a given problem.
>it was Thomas Jefferson's idea
I'm sorry but this is just a misrepresentation of reality. The metric system as we know it it today, which is primarily awful from it's base unit of measurement being based on Earth (not the humans that actually have to use it), has it's historical roots firmly in France, not the heavily (at the time) anglo-centric USA or Jefferson.
That said, Jefferson's system wasn't bad. He used the foot as the fundamental unit of measurement so it wouldn't have been too terrible. I have some issues with it (specifically my aforementioned desire for a FUNCTIONAL dual system and retention of a mile as approx. 1000 paces) but it's leagues better than our current system and the metric system alone (and yes I did know that we technically already incorporated the metric system into ours).
I get that your military service trained you to think in metric but it just isn't a natural cultural outgrowth. It's like if some government mandated some conlang as a second national language. Past all the (I think) objectively valid reasons I just gave against it, it also feels fake to me. I find it slightly disturbing that so many wish so heavily to distance their minds from their bodies. I disagree wholeheartedly with this premise that disintegrating measures with the human body has no ill effects. It's a very "head with the chicken cut off" mentality.
I'm not questioning your patriotism, nor would I even think it even relevant to this discussion. I don't think a measurement system should imply loyalties to any institution save reason and utility. I wouldn't take such criticism seriously - it is, at best, playful banter and, at worst, a patently losing argument. I mean, why would I, as an American below the 39th have nationalist loyalty to a system primarily incepted by an English King and his Parliament? We fought and won two wars to be rid of their rule and now we aren't patriotic for using their weights and measures? It's nonsense. I realize many people hold this inane view, and you had little means to know who exactly does, but I am not one of them. I partially identify with the emotions of such people, but I also do with the emotions of flat earthers, in their skepticism of science, and yet I still think the the world is a sphere. Such is the folly of listening to your gut but not your brain.
The thing that shocked me when I went to the US was the difference between miles and feet, when the navigator switched from saying "in a quarter of a mile turn right" to in 800 feet turn right, I was just WTF? I'm used to the navigator switch from kilometres and meters in a sane way, where saying 1/4 of a kilometre is obvious that is 250 meters, the same is not true from miles and feet. Also the navigator some time did display it like 0.1 miles and the other in foots! How do you don't find it confusing? In metric you just move the decimal point around, isn't it more simple?
Another thing that I find confusing is that it's not obvious to imagine a quantity, since with metric you know that 1kg is equivalent of 1 litre of water that has the volume of a cube of 10x10x10cm. So when you say about a litre of gasoline you more or less imagine the weight it has (even if it's not the same of the one of water, approximately) and the volume that it takes. How do you do that with gallons?
I find what you said about GPS navigation in miles and feet INSANELY confusing as well. I think it's idiotic. I can't conceptualize it, whereas in km and meters it's super clear to me. My phone's navigation always calls out in metric, which I prefer for this reason, among others.
The inch is a particularly handy measurement for me, since my thumb is pretty close to one inch across, so I can measure inches just by placing one thumb in front of the other.
Luke you forgot the most important conversion! 750 ml of wine = 1 drunk person
Lol
Ooh, has anyone mentioned in the comments how a lot of the symbols for imperial measurements are of Latin origin?
Like 'lb' coming from an abbreviation for the Latin 'Libra pondo'?
Or 'oz' for ounces coming from the Latin 'uncia' by way of the Italian 'onzia'.
Indeed! All that is very cool.
Will never give up my 9/16 or 11/32 wrenches! Imperial is way better for temps according to humans. 100 is hot and 0 is freeze all your bits off cold. Miles are cooler than klicks. Lifting lbs is more satisfying than lifting kg since the number is bigger. I'll only argue for the adoption of height in metric so the 6' cutoff in dating is obscured haha. But really, I think a majority of Americans are familiar enough with metric to the point where it's not an issue.
The measuring tape and the whole familiarity topic reminded me of how here in Europe I see multi-scale measuring tapes, and multi-scale thermometers (despite the mainland having been metric since before 1900), whereas whenever I see American clips of measuring tapes they're always inches-feet only. Not sure about thermometers :D But I bet if the tools surrounding people exposed them to metric units even like that, they'd be much less alien to them.
I live in the US, and I've never seen a tape measure not having cm in addition to inches. Many of our kitchen measuring cups also have metric scales.
@@StrategicGamesEtc That's great to hear actually :D
I think all the measuring tapes and folding rulers I have are in cm only.
Pints and ounces are all well and good, but what I *really* need to know is drams and scruples. Maybe pennyworths too.
Indeed
Video on how to use metres and liters please
I do advocate for extending the life of the penny by switching cents to pence.
100 cents = $1 = 144 pence
50 cents = half dollar = 72 pence = 2 quarters
25 cents = quarter dollar = 36 pence
The only change is a dime needs to = 12 pence
12 dimes = $1
This change is long overdue as the cost of copper results in the US losing money with every penny produced, even with using zinc coins plated in thin layer of copper.
3:40, that may be the case if metric wasn't mandated by governments. As it is, you can't use this as evidence to refute any claims based on general use or adoption.
Ask a Canadian what they prefer. The US and Imperial systems of measurement have advantages that aren't overcome by decimalization.
some things are common outside America, i've heard feet when discussing altitude on European planes before, and the whole tablespoon thing is not that uncommon, most people i know have the measuring spoons in their kitchen, doesn't really matter what it is in metric, just get the measuring spoons and there you go lol
it's more common to use grams than measuring spoons in other parts of the world
Aviation uses feet and miles in the whole world and Europeans have spoons but no special ones for measuring like in the US.
Thanks for somewhat touching on the fact that US customary units and imperial units are different. It drives me nuts when people just say "imperial".
Yeah, it's linguistically descriptive to admit that "imperial" is used in the US in this sense. Prescriptively it's wrong.
When guessing is sufficient for everyday life, the imperial system will do, as any system would do, no need to change. But when it comes to to combining different units like weight and volume or speed and energy and precision is required then there will be trouble. But most Americans never do this, so why change?
glad, that you covered the most important american unit of all: the football field
🏈
i remember some NASA disasters due to metric system mistakes , hows that possible is easier to use metric system in electronic systems (i am an electronic engineer...).....
@polýMATHY do you know what part of Zauberföte was "converted" into the Canadian National Anthem? (I insist!)
I know every theme in Die Zauberflöte like the back of my hand, but until just now I never listened with attention to the Canadian National Anthem. With the clue you gave me, I instantly recognised Marsch der Priester, the opening music to the second act: ua-cam.com/video/OvKAsZxI9cQ/v-deo.html
This is really cool; I had no idea. Our neighbors to the north have always had a special place in my heart, so this is another reason for me to appreciate Canada. Thanks so much!
@@polyMATHY_Luke Bingo! "Oh Canada" has always sounded familiar to me without knowing how until I discovered that on a UA-cam channel a few months ago. I am not a fan of opera in general (too many spoken words) but "Die Zauberflöte", "Figaro" and "Don Giovanni" (which refers to Figaro too, do you know when?) are my references. Those are just divine.
I do know when! During the dinner scene when the dinner music plays, whereupon "Non più andrai" (the first Italian song I ever learned by heart, incidentally) plays, and the Don says it all sounds too familiar hahaha.
1.6(1mile)=kilometer
1.28(1meter)=yard.