Americans, what's so great about the Imperial System?

[Sean951]

Well, one fairly major reason is that the entire US road system is base on the United States Public Land Survey System, broken up in to Townships (36 square miles), sections (1 square mile/640 acres), and then sub-divided in halves and quarters. Updating the signs would be an exercise in annoyance, as our nice round numbers would suddenly become "1.6 km, 3.2 km, etc."

 

[Mr C]

Some things aren't easy to change, even with willingness. I'm in my mid 30's and grew up in the UK and though I never used imperial in school, it was used around me (my Mother still has no fucking clue what a cm is). Though we are almost metric, some things I don't see how to reasonalbly change, like speed limits. Dual information is potentially dangerous and I don't see a swap to be much different.

 

[Agent_Dark]

When you get into engineering, it doesnt matter which system you use because you just use equations.

Err, when you get into engineering you use the metric system, because the whole concept of Engineering Notation is based around the metric system. Every order of magnitude is represented by a factor of 1000 on the previous one.

nano is 0.000000001 or 10e-9 in scientific notation

micro (µ) is 0.000001 or 10e-6

milli (m) is 0.001 or 10e-3

kilo (k) is 1000 or 10e3

Mega (M) is 1,000,000 or 10e6

Giga (G) is 1,000,000,000 or 10e9

and so on. This makes calculations involving values with different common orders of magnitudes incredibly easy. Want to convert millimetres into metres? Just move the decimal 3 places to the left and change the prefix (eg 750mm becomes 0.750m). Want to multiply 30 kilometres by 15 millimetres? No need to go chasing up conversions between orders of magnitudes - 1 milli essentially 'cancels out' 1 kilo, so you have 450 metres (30 x 15 = 450). To that for miles and inches requires 3 calculations (2 calcs to convert the two values into a common unit, and then another to multiply them together).

 

[BrownGaijin]

A man named Tevye was able to sum it up in one word:

 

[shootthebandit]

Lets use an aircraft as an example and say its under ideal conditions and in level flight (lift and weight cancel each other out). After subtracting the drag from the thrust i get a total of 100N of forward force (just a random figure) i then know the aircraft is 1000kgs (again random) its easy for me to say that its accelerating at 0.1 ms^-2. However if you measure thrust in pounds how can you calculate the acceleration?

You have the thrust force in pounds, you have the mass of your plane(from its weight in pounds divided by acceleration due to gravity), you can get acceleration. This is why i said its easier to use imperial in practice. The average person won't have to go and calculate the acceleration of a plane. The average person will, however, have to deal with lengths and speed. Imperial units can easily be divided into halves, thirds, fourths, eighths, and sixteenths. a fourth being a half of a half, an eighth being a half of that, and a sixteenth a half of an eighth. I find it much easier to be able to divide things like this as opposed to dividing things into halves, fifths, tenths, hundredths.
Back to the more technical stuff. I think I was a bit too close-minded in my assertion that force is better to work with over mass. Your example shows that when dealing with moving objects, mass is easier to work with. But in my studies (structural engineering) we don't deal with moving objects. Everything is (essentially) stationary, and so we don't have to deal with how much things accelerate on a regular basis.

Which makes it more complicated as you have to work out the mass by dividing the weight by gravity. You will then have a unit of ppp (pounds per pound) as the pound is also the unit of mass and force which is a completely useless measure of acceleration which would then have to be calculated into a logical unit using a conversion. Can you see now why metric is easier and imperial is just there to waste your time? You can then integrate with respect to time and get the velocity and then integrate again with respect to time to get a distance (this is essentially how an interial navigation system works only it will use accelerometers)

The average person dealing with lengths can use imperial or metric (which ever they feel comfortable) as they tend not to deal with any degree of accuracy. However as soon as you get to any sort of accuracy imperial falls flat on its face. Take for example measuring a piece of wood (not a material which requires massive amounts of accuracy and something your average joe would do). Say it measures 35mm all youve done is count 35 seperate increments on your rule because you are logically measuring 35. 35mm is 1 3/8" (ive kept it relatively easy) so you are going to have to count 1 and then 3/8 which isnt much more effort but its more complicated than simply counting to 35. If you had to measure the distance between two potential cuts then you have to subtract the values and thats a hell of a lot easier in metric when its just one number from another without needlessly adding fractions. This is a hell of a lot of effort for putting up a simple shelf or a cabinet.

I dont have anything against imperial its just that metric is so much easier and will save so much effort

 

[direkiller]

Ok, then let's get this started. I read up a bit on the Imperial System and i just can't find any great benefits to it.

Quite simply it is good for practical things when building. Wood Frames are 16" center to center, even in places with metric, it's not a number that works out nicely, and quite simply it saves time. Tiles are done in sq feet aswell due to there size.

Also how often do you have to convert? that is all I hear people say when it comes to metric, and i almost never see it even in science, they still want it in base units. So with that the strength of metric is out the window and it just comes down to what numbers you remember more, and quite frankly the imperial numbers are just easier when wood and steel are involved.

40 centimeters is a less convenient dimensional standard for a frame than 16 inches? I'm not sure I see it. Switching from square foot tiles over to 9 square decimeters doesn't seem like too much of a hassle either.

As to how often I have to convert, go look up a couple of intermediate dynamics problems and try to stick with imperial units throughout, I dare you.

40 cm is not equal to 16in exactly so yes it is a problem when you are dealing with the length of a wall, or floors.
there is also 12" and 24"CC frames which are standard for one simple reason, they line up with drywall and plywood which are the same size wherever you go. It's far better to just use imperial units then to have the sheetrock/drywall not line up with the studs,because some dumb ass was .6cm off every time he placed a stud.

As for floor space it's less about the area and more about an estimate on the amount of tiles you need, rounding the room dimensions to the nearest foot gives you a quick and dirty estimate for the cost.


I realize i am saying imperial is easyer because all the building materials match up nicely with imperial units because ameica.
but yea Imperial just leaves you with easier numbers

 

[Doom-Slayer]

I'm down for switching. Except for distances. I'm driving a hundred miles dammit, not 160 km. And maybe height too because saying I'm 5'8" sounds better than 1.7018 meters.

Thats just as meaningless as me saying the reverse "I'm driving a hundred kilometres dammit, not 62 miles". And for height you dont use milimetres...thats like using inches to talk about the height of a building.

5 foot 8 inches or colloquially 5 8.

1 meter 70 centimeters or colloquially 170.

Its exactly the same. You just think theres a difference because you use one system more than the other.

OT: Every reason you can come up to use Imperial is preferential, therefore a standardized versus non-standardized is always better.

 

[Risingblade]

It works fine for us, sure it's not easier than the metric system but it's not inaccurate either.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

I think the main reason US doesn't change to Metric system is because it would cost millions to do so.

This.

Just changing all the highway mile markers, exit signs, and other mile-related stuff (to say nothing of any other type of unit) would be astronomically expensive.

 

[Kukakkau]

As for temperature, whereas Centigrade was calibrated to the freezing and boiling points of water, Fahrenheit was calibrated to the freezing point of water and average human body heat. In other words, the temperature is calibrated to 2 useful temperatures, making is a handy estimate of comfortable temperature range.

But fahrenheit doesn't calibrate to the freezing point of water. Water freezes at 32 fahrenheit. Zero degrees fahrenheit comes out at -17.8 celsius.
Zero fahrenheit is for the freezing point of brine, which isn't exactly a useful everyday measurement for a lot of people.

On topic - never understood imperial measurements, metric is easy to understand and convert units making it useful in so many ways.

 

[Vegosiux]

I think the main reason US doesn't change to Metric system is because it would cost millions to do so.

This.

Just changing all the highway mile markers, exit signs, and other mile-related stuff (to say nothing of any other type of unit) would be astronomically expensive.

Yet it would create a lot of business and revenue, so the combined profits would also be astronomical. The money wouldn't be absorbed by a black hole, it would be given to companies, who would also need to create more (temporary, admittedly) job openings and the like.

Not saying you should use as a "subsidizing" or that you should go for it so that you create business for your companies, but basically, that money wouldn't be "lost".

 

[shootthebandit]

this [http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html] explains the "logic" behind imperial measurements. I dont think its exactly true but it still makes a good point

 

[Agent_Dark]

ar·bi·trar·y
ˈärbiˌtrerē/
adjective
adjective: arbitrary

1.
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.

Why the length of a pendulum swing?
Answer: Some guy in the 1600s thought it would be a good length

Why 1/10,000,000th the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the meridian line passing through Paris?
why not London or New York?
Why not the circumference of the earth at the 22nd parallel? Or at the equator?
Why not 1/100,000,000th or 1/50,000,000?
Answer: Some guy though it would be a good length

Why the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1 / 299,792,458 of a second?
Why not 1/300,000,000 of a second?
or even 1/299,792,450 of a second?

WHY!?!

W H Y ! ? !

I'll tell you why
Some
guy
thought
it
would
be
a
good
length


And a lot of other people agreed
if they had not the meter would have vanished having never seen the light of day

You would say that he (and they) had good reasons to do it the way they did
well guess what

some guy thought a foot would be a good length
his reason was that there were too many different lengths and it was too ARBITRARY so he standardized it so that when one person said foot everyone knew what he meant
it helped trade
and map making
and Law
and construction
and many other things

Standardized Measurements are not universal truths no matter how you come up with them
they are practical language and culture
they exist to service understanding
and changing them all for no better reason than a bunch of guys in lab coats(who use the other system ANYWAY) find it EASIER is not a reason to confuse the language of a people for decades

You're missing the point of those standardised measurements. They're not standardised because some guys got together and just decided to make it so. They're standardised because they should be easily and accurately reproduced each time you need to reference the standard measurement. Consider:

You are measuring the length of something in feet. Whose foot is the standard? Is it Amazon Anne's foot? Or is it Tiny Tim's foot? Amazon Anne measures the length of the rope as 6 feet. Tiny Tim measures it as 8 feet. Which is the correct measurement? Who's foot is the standard?

You are measuring the length of something in metres. The metre is defined as the "length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second". This defines the metre in terms of the speed of light, which means I can then use a Helium-Neon laser in a vacuum and measure 1,579,800.762042(33) wavelengths of that laser to calibrate my measuring device to 1m with a stated uncertainty. I can do this anywhere in (or out of) the world.

Now obviously there is a huge scientific gap between those definitions of foot and metre, which is to be expected considering the use of feet as a measurement dates back to the ancient world. But my point is that there is a very distinct difference in how those two measurements have come about. One is based on a repeatable and accurate observation and the other is obviously not. The kicker (pun intended!) of course is that all uses of feet nowadays are actually defined in metres anyway, basically for exactly this reason.

 

[shootthebandit]

I think the main reason US doesn't change to Metric system is because it would cost millions to do so.

This.

Just changing all the highway mile markers, exit signs, and other mile-related stuff (to say nothing of any other type of unit) would be astronomically expensive.

Yet it would create a lot of business and revenue, so the combined profits would also be astronomical. The money wouldn't be absorbed by a black hole, it would be given to companies, who would also need to create more (temporary, admittedly) job openings and the like.

Not saying you should use as a "subsidizing" or that you should go for it so that you create business for your companies, but basically, that money wouldn't be "lost".

Or simply do what the UK has done and leave the road system in miles but do everything else in metric

 

[talideon]

so what?
You carve up the distance light travels into a certain number of chunks
We cave it up into a different number of chunks
that is the definition of arbitrary

Eh... it's less arbitrary than that. In fact, the definition of the metre has always been an attempt to find a non-arbitrary measurement based off of natural constants.

The real original proposal for the metre came from John Wilkins in the mid-1600s, and was defined as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second. The only truly arbitrary thing (at the time) there is the length of a second. However, it was found that due to gravity varying slightly over the surface of the Earth, that wasn't ultimately workable, so after the French Revolution, it was defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the meridian line passing through Paris. This was pretty damned close to Wilkins' original proposal and had the benefit of being more absolute. However, we later found that measurement to be less stable and more mathematically complex than would be convenient, so other standards were used, until we settled on using the speed of light, which is, best as we can tell, a fundamental constant.

And thus it turns out that the only thing that makes a metre arbitrary is the length of a second, and I'm OK with that.

ar·bi·trar·y
ˈärbiˌtrerē/
adjective
adjective: arbitrary

1.
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.

Why the length of a pendulum swing?
Answer: Some guy in the 1600s thought it would be a good length

It wasn't arbitrary. There was a reason behind it: the idea behind using the pendulum was reproducibility. Nobody chose a metre as a good length, it was simply a measurement that could be easily and repeatedly derived from physical phenomena using a simple apparatus.

Why 1/10,000,000th the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along the meridian line passing through Paris?

why not London or New York?
Why not the circumference of the earth at the 22nd parallel? Or at the equator?
Why not 1/100,000,000th or 1/50,000,000?
Answer: Some guy though it would be a good length
[/quote]

Several reasons, but the main one being that it was as close as they could get to the original metre. The idea was to preserve the measurement using a more accurate mechanism.

Why the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1 / 299,792,458 of a second?
Why not 1/300,000,000 of a second?
or even 1/299,792,450 of a second?

WHY!?!

Because then you'd be changing the physical length of a metre from existing standard measurement.

I'll tell you why
Some
guy
thought
it
would
be
a
good
length

Could you please be a little less obnoxious?

And a lot of other people agreed

And for a good reason: the idea was to find a universal measurement that wouldn't change over time. All these seemingly odd mechanism were chosen for that specific reason, and each one was a refinement on the previous one as far as universality went. The lack of a consistent, reproducible basis for measurement was a huge issue: the introduction and subsequent refinement of a universal unit of measurement was a huge boon. There's a good reason why the US customary measurement system is defined in terms of SI units.

Nobody chose the metre to be the length it is: it simply fell out of the mechanism originally used to derive a universal measurement.

some guy thought a foot would be a good length

Except nobody actually agreed on what a foot was. Equivalent customary units varied quite a bit across Europe and even within countries. A foot seems like a good basis for measurement, but how do you consistently derive the length of a foot? The thing is that nobody had a consistent way to derive the length of a foot. But the metre started with the derivation mechanism first, which was critical to solving the problem of finding a universal measurement.

Standardized Measurements are not universal truths no matter how you come up with them
they are practical language and culture
they exist to service understanding
and changing them all for no better reason than a bunch of guys in lab coats(who use the other system ANYWAY) find it EASIER is not a reason to confuse the language of a people for decades

I think what you're missing is that until the metre was derived, there was no universal and standardised measurement mechanism. The whole point of the SI units was to develop standardised measurements.

 

[Heronblade]

Ok, then let's get this started. I read up a bit on the Imperial System and i just can't find any great benefits to it.

Quite simply it is good for practical things when building. Wood Frames are 16" center to center, even in places with metric, it's not a number that works out nicely, and quite simply it saves time. Tiles are done in sq feet aswell due to there size.

Also how often do you have to convert? that is all I hear people say when it comes to metric, and i almost never see it even in science, they still want it in base units. So with that the strength of metric is out the window and it just comes down to what numbers you remember more, and quite frankly the imperial numbers are just easier when wood and steel are involved.

40 centimeters is a less convenient dimensional standard for a frame than 16 inches? I'm not sure I see it. Switching from square foot tiles over to 9 square decimeters doesn't seem like too much of a hassle either.

As to how often I have to convert, go look up a couple of intermediate dynamics problems and try to stick with imperial units throughout, I dare you.

40 cm is not equal to 16in exactly so yes it is a problem when you are dealing with the length of a wall, or floors.
there is also 12" and 24"CC frames which are standard for one simple reason, they line up with drywall and plywood which are the same size wherever you go. It's far better to just use imperial units then to have the sheetrock/drywall not line up with the studs,because some dumb ass was .6cm off every time he placed a stud.

As for floor space it's less about the area and more about an estimate on the amount of tiles you need, rounding the room dimensions to the nearest foot gives you a quick and dirty estimate for the cost.


I realize i am saying imperial is easyer because all the building materials match up nicely with imperial units because ameica.
but yea Imperial just leaves you with easier numbers

TLDR: Imperial is easier because people have been using Imperial. The numbers I gave were approximations of what a metric standard size might look like, I know they are not exact conversions of what is being used now.

Let me ask you this, if the companies that supply sheetrock shifted over to a 60 centimeter width, and other dimensional standards in architectural plans adjusted to similar simple standards do you think a building company would really have that much trouble adjusting their frames to match?

 

[the doom cannon]

and so on. This makes calculations involving values with different common orders of magnitudes incredibly easy. Want to convert millimetres into metres? Just move the decimal 3 places to the left and change the prefix (eg 750mm becomes 0.750m). Want to multiply 30 kilometres by 15 millimetres? No need to go chasing up conversions between orders of magnitudes - 1 milli essentially 'cancels out' 1 kilo, so you have 450 metres (30 x 15 = 450). To that for miles and inches requires 3 calculations (2 calcs to convert the two values into a common unit, and then another to multiply them together).

i can tell you exactly how many times I've used miles in engineering: 0. Miles are usually used as an approximation. Rarely does anyone actually expect a mile to mean 5280 feet when someone says "I want to put in 2 miles of pipe." Always feet or inches, with appropriate multiplications by 10 to the whatever power. Always pounds or kips times 10 to the whatever power.

--

except i could just count 1 inch and 3 1/8 inch marks. heck, a lot of precision measuring tapes will give me 32nds.
the mass unit for imperial is a slug, just fyi. And nobody ever uses it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(mass)
acceleration is feet per second per second, no different from meters per second per second.

 

[BleedingPride]

As an american, i'd like to state for the record that the imperial system is useful for sweet FA. seriously, the rest of the world is on a scientific measuring system based on systems of 10. and here i am stuck with inches and feet and having to do a bajillion conversions for science classes. the imperial system sucks for me.

 

[Proto Taco]

The imperial system sucks buckets, but our government is too busy proving they're holier than everyone else to bother switching it.

Do I sound bitter? No, of course not. After all it's not like my government just got finished shutting down due to asinine juvenile bickering, never.